1

THE EVOLUTION OF DARWINIAN LIBERALISM

Larry Arnhart

Department of Political Science

Northern Illinois University

DeKalb, Illinois

larnhart1@niu.edu

http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com

This paper was prepared for presentation at a conference of the Mont Pèlerin

Society on “Evolution, the Human Sciences, and Liberty,” in the Galápagos

Islands, June 22-29, 2013

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 3

Darwin and the Libertarians 5

Natural Desires 8

Cultural Traditions 10

Individual Judgments 11

1. THE EVOLUTION OF MORAL ANTHROPOLOGY 13

From Plato to Lucretius 13

Smith’s Marketplace of Life 16

Darwin, Cobbe, and the Morality of Bees and Termites 22

Hayek’s Evolutionary Liberalism 27

Hayek’s Denial of Instinct 28

Hayek’s Denial of Reason 34

2. THE EVOLUTION OF SELF-OWNERSHIP, PROPERTY, AND

MAMMALIAN SOCIALITY 36

Self-Ownership as Liberalism’s First Principle of Human Nature 36

The Neurobiology of Care 39

The Biology of Property 41

3. THE EVOLUTION OF EXCHANGE AND SPECIALIZATION 43

The Evolution of the “Propensity to Truck, Barter, and Exchange” 43

The Neurobiology of Exchange 47

A Darwinian Account of England’s Industrial Revolution 49

The End of the (Human) World 51

4. THE EVOLUTION OF LIMITED GOVERNMENT 53

Liberal Governmentalism Versus Libertarian Anarchism 53

The Lockean History of Political Evolution 62

The Bushmen in Locke’s State of Nature 71

The Evolutionary Anthropology of Egalitarian Hierarchy 74

5. THE EVOLUTION OF DECLINING VIOLENCE AND THE LIBERAL

PEACE 81

The Liberal Turn from Violence to Voluntarism 81

The Invisible Hand of the Liberal Evolution Against Violence 83

CONCLUSION 87

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INTRODUCTION

In 1859, with the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, it became

possible, for the first time in history, to be an intellectually fulfilled liberal.1

Darwinian evolutionary science has shown that Adam Smith was right about

almost everything. In his defense of what he called “the natural system of liberty,”

Smith was right to see that the social orders of morality, markets, law, and politics

can arise as largely spontaneous orders, which emerge as unintended outcomes

from the actions of individuals pursuing the satisfaction of their individual desires.

The Darwinian science of evolutionary order has confirmed this central idea of

Smithian liberalism.2

That Darwin’s work favored liberalism was indicated in Thomas Huxley’s

review of Darwin’s book a few months after its publication. Huxley declared:

"every philosophical thinker hails it as a veritable Whitworth gun in the armory of

liberalism."3 The Whitworth gun was a new kind of breech-loading cannon — a

powerful weapon, then, for liberalism.

Another indication of this link between Darwinism and liberalism came

almost one hundred years later, in 1957, at a meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society.

Friedrich Hayek delivered a speech entitled “Why I Am Not a Conservative,”

which was followed by a response from Russell Kirk.4 Hayek explained that one

of the reasons that he preferred to identify himself as a liberal rather than a

conservative was that conservatives like Kirk rejected Darwin’s theory of

evolution as denying the conservative belief in a divinely designed transcendent

moral order. This was a crucial issue for Hayek because his defense of liberalism

was founded on a Darwinian explanation of social life as an unintended product of

“spontaneous evolution” that did not depend upon intelligent design or a cosmic

moral order.

The fundamental idea of liberalism is that society is largely a self-regulating

unintended order—a largely self-enforcing order created unintentionally by the

free exchanges of individuals seeking to satisfy their individual desires.5

1 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in

the Struggle for Life (London: John Murray, 1859). 2 I have drawn some of my writing in this introductory section from my essay on “Darwinian Liberalism” at Cato

Unbound, July, 2010, http://www.cato-unbound.org/issues/july-2010/darwin-politics. 3 Thomas Henry Huxley, “The Origin of Species,” Westminster Review 17 (1860): 541-70.

4 See Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 395-411; and

Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 2012), 140-45. 5 See Ronald Hamowy, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Theory of Spontaneous Order (Carbondale: Southern

Illinois University Press, 1987); Norman Barry, “The Tradition of Spontaneous Order,” Literature of Liberty, 5

(Summer 1982): 7-58; and Ralph Raico, Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von

Mises Institute, 2012).

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Darwinian evolutionary science supports that liberal idea by showing how human

social order arises from the evolutionary interaction of the unintended orders of

human nature and human culture and the intended order of human reason. Thus,

social order is largely self-regulating insofar as it emerges from the unintended

evolution of human nature and human culture; but social order is not completely

self-regulating insofar as it is influenced by the intentional choices of human

individuals, although those human choices are constrained by human nature and

human culture.

In Darwin’s lifetime, liberalism meant classical liberalism — the moral and

political tradition of individual liberty understood as the right of individuals to be

free from violent coercion so long as they respect the equal liberty of others.

According to the liberals, the primary aim of government was to secure individual

rights from force and fraud, which included enforcing laws of contract and private

property. They thought the moral and intellectual character of human beings was

properly formed not by governmental coercion, but in the natural and voluntary

associations of civil society.

Although Darwin in his scientific writing was not as explicit as Herbert

Spencer in affirming the evolutionary argument for liberalism, those like Huxley

saw that Darwin’s science supported liberalism. Darwin himself was a fervent

supporter of the British Liberal Party and its liberal policies. He was honored

when William Gladstone (the “Grand Old Man” of the Liberal Party) visited him at

his home in Down in 1877.6

Like other liberals, Darwin admired and practiced the virtues of self-help, as

promoted in Samuel Smiles’ popular book Self-Help, with its stories of self-made

men. Darwin was active in the charitable activities of his parish. He was the

treasurer of the local Friendly Society. In Great Britain, friendly societies were

self-governing associations of manual laborers who shared their resources and

pledged to help one another in time of hardship.7 In this way, individuals could

secure their social welfare and acquire good character through voluntary mutual

aid without the need for governmental coercion.

Darwin was also active in the international campaign against slavery, one of

the leading liberal causes of his day. In their recent book Darwin’s Sacred Cause,

Adrian Desmond and James Moore have shown that Darwin’s hatred of slavery

was one motivation for his writing The Descent of Man, in which he affirmed the

universality of humanity as belonging to one species, against the pro-slavery racial

6 See Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist (New York: Warner Books,

1991), 625-28, 7 On the history of fraternal societies and mutual aid in liberal societies, see David G. Green, Reinventing Civil

Society: The Rediscovery of Welfare Without Politics (London: IEA Health and Welfare Unit, 1993); and David T.

Beito, From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State: Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890-1967 (Chapel Hill:

University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

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science of those who argued that some human beings belonged to a separate

species of natural slaves.8

Also in The Descent of Man, Darwin showed that the moral order of human

life arose through a natural moral sense as shaped by organic and cultural

evolution. He thus provided a scientific basis for the moral liberalism of David

Hume, Adam Smith, and the other Scottish philosophers, who argued that the

moral and intellectual virtues could arise through the spontaneous orders of human

nature and human culture.

Darwin and the Libertarians

One might expect that those people in the United States who today call themselves

libertarians —who continue the tradition of classical liberalism — would want to

embrace Darwin and evolutionary science as sustaining their position. But

libertarians are ambivalent about Darwin and Darwinism. That ambivalence is

evident, for example, in The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism, edited by Ronald

Hamowy, under the sponsorship of the Cato Institute.9 There is no entry in the

encyclopedia for Charles Darwin. But there are entries for Herbert Spencer, Social

Darwinism, and Evolutionary Psychology. In these and other entries, one can see

intimations that libertarianism could be rooted in a Darwinian science of human

nature. But one can also see suggestions that Darwin’s science has little or no

application to libertarian thought.

The entry on “Evolutionary Psychology” is written by Leda Cosmides and

John Tooby, the founders of the research tradition that goes by the name of

“evolutionary psychology.”10

They indicate that evolutionary psychology was

begun by Darwin. They say that its aim is to map human nature as rooted in the

evolved architecture of the human mind. They summarize some of this evolved

human nature, including reasoning about social exchange and cheater detection

that provides the cognitive foundations of trade and the moral sentiments that make

moral order possible. They contrast this idea of a universal human nature with the

idea of the human mind as a blank slate that is infinitely malleable by social

learning. They say that the false idea of the blank slate explains the failure of those

experiments in social engineering that denied human nature, as illustrated by the

failed communist regimes. This all suggests that a Darwinian evolutionary

psychology could support a libertarian view of human nature.

8 Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on

Human Evolution (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009). 9 Ronald Hamowy, ed., The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism (Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2008).

10 Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, “Evolutionary Psychology,” in Hamowy, Encyclopedia of Libertarianism, 158-

61.

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But Cosmides and Tooby also cast doubt on this conclusion. Although the

implementation of public policy proposals needs to take human nature into

account, they say, “the position most central to libertarianism — that human

relationships should be based on the voluntary consent of the individuals involved

— makes few if any assumptions about human nature.” They don’t explain what

they mean by this. One interpretation is that they are making a fact-value

distinction, and suggesting that while the calculation of means to ends is a factual

judgment that might be open to scientific research, the moral assessment of ends

— such as the value of individual liberty — is a normative judgment that is beyond

scientific research.

Perhaps their thought is more clearly stated by Will Wilkinson in his essay

on “Capitalism and Human Nature”:

We cannot expect to draw any straightforward positive political

lessons from evolutionary psychology. It can tell us something about

the kind of society that will tend not to work, and why. But it cannot

tell us which of the feasible forms of society we ought to aspire to.

We cannot, it turns out, infer the naturalness of capitalism from the

manifest failure of communism to accommodate human nature. Nor

should we be tempted to infer that natural is better. Foraging half-

naked for nuts and berries is natural, while the New York Stock

Exchange and open-heart surgery would boggle our ancestors’

minds.11

Wilkinson argues that while our evolved human nature constrains the possibilities

of social order, the historical move to liberal capitalism — the transition from

personal to impersonal exchange — was a “great cultural leap,” as Hayek

emphasized. Within the limits set by evolved human nature, the emergence of

liberal capitalism depends on cultural evolution. “We have, through culture,

enhanced those traits that facilitate trust and cooperation, channeled our coalitional

and status-seeking instincts toward productive uses, and built upon our natural

suspicion of power to preserve our freedom.”

This dependence of classical liberalism on cultural evolution is also stressed

by George Smith in his encyclopedia entries on “Social Darwinism” and “Herbert

Spencer.”12

Smith argues that Spencer’s view of evolution was Lamarckian, and

therefore quite different from Darwin’s view. While Spencer’s Lamarckian

conception of evolution through the inheritance of acquired characteristics has

11

Will Wilkinson, “Capitalism and Human Nature,” Cato Policy Report 27 (January/February 2005), 1, 12-15,

http://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/policy-report/2005/1/cpr-27n1-1.pdf

12

George Smith, “Social Darwinism,” in Hamowy, Encyclopedia of Libertrianism, 472-74; Smith, “Herbert Spencer

(1820-1903),” in Hamowy, Encyclopedia of Libertarianism, 483-85.

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been discredited as biological theory, Smith observes, this is actually a better

approach for understanding social history than is Darwin’s biological approach.

Social evolution — including the evolution of liberal capitalism — really is

Lamarckian in that the social practices successful for one generation can be passed

on to the next generation through social learning as a system of cultural

inheritance. Most importantly for Spencer, the move from regimes of status based

on coercive exploitation to regimes of contract based on voluntary cooperation was

a process of cultural rather than biological evolution. Smith suggests, therefore,

that the liberal principle of equal liberty arose not from biological nature but from

cultural history.

Furthermore, Smith argues, Spencer and other classical liberals understood

that market competition differed radically from biological competition. Biological

competition is a zero-sum game where the survival of one organism is at the

expense of others competing for the same scarce resources. But market

competition is a positive-sum game where all the participants can gain from

voluntary exchanges with one another. In a liberal society of free markets based

on voluntary exchanges, success depends on persuasion rather than coercion,

because we must give to others what they want to get what we want. Smith

concludes: “It is precisely in a free society that Social Darwinism does not apply.”

There’s a big problem with Smith’s analysis. If Social Darwinism means

explaining all social order through biological evolution based on zero-sum

competition, then Darwin was not a Social Darwinist. Darwin saw that social

animals are naturally inclined to cooperate with one another for mutual benefit.

Human social and moral order arises as an extension of this natural tendency to

social cooperation based on kinship, mutuality, and reciprocity. Modern

Darwinian study of the evolution of cooperation shows that such cooperation is a

positive-sum game.

Moreover, Darwin accepted Lamarckian thinking about what he called “the

inherited effects of the long-continued use or disuse of parts.” And he saw that the

moral and social progress of human beings came much more through cultural

evolution by social learning than organic evolution by natural selection.13

Darwin’s reasoning has been confirmed by recent research on gene-culture co-

evolution.14

As Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb have shown, a broad

understanding of evolution must encompass four systems of evolutionary

inheritance — genetic, epigenetic, behavioral, and symbolic.15

And although

13

See Darwin, Descent of Man, 140, 155-56, 163, 169, 677, 682, 688-89. 14

See Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd, Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 15

Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions:Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic

Variation in the History of Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006).

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symbolic evolution is uniquely human, the cultural evolution of behavioral

traditions is manifest among other animals, especially primates.16

Darwin’s liberalism combines an Aristotelian ethics of social virtue and a

Lockean politics of individual liberty. This is the sort of liberalism that has been

recently defended by Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl in their books

Liberty and Nature and Norms of Liberty and by Den Uyl in his book The Virtue of

Prudence.17

To anyone who knows about my advocacy of “Darwinian conservatism,” it

must seem odd that I am now arguing for “Darwinian liberalism.” But the

conservatism I have defended is a liberal conservatism that combines a libertarian

concern for liberty and a traditionalist concern for virtue. This is similar to the

“fusionist” conservatism of Frank Meyer, which is close to the Aristotelian

liberalism of Rasmussen and Den Uyl.18

To see how Darwinian science supports classical liberalism, we must see

how the liberal principles of equal liberty have arisen from the complex interaction

of natural desires, cultural traditions, and individual judgments.

Natural Desires If the good is the desirable, then a Darwinian science can help us understand the

human good by showing us how our natural desires are rooted in our evolved

human nature. In Darwinian Natural Right and Darwinian Conservatism, I have

argued that there are at least twenty natural desires that are universally expressed in

all human societies because they have been shaped by genetic evolution as natural

propensities of the human species.19

Human beings generally desire a complete

life, parental care, sexual identity, sexual mating, familial bonding, friendship,

social status, justice as reciprocity, political rule, courage in war, health, beauty,

property, speech, practical habituation, practical reasoning, practical arts, aesthetic

pleasure, religious understanding, and intellectual understanding.

In Darwin’s writings on human evolution — particularly, The Descent of

Man and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals — he accounts for

16

See Kevin N. Laland and Bennett G. Galef, eds., The Question of Animal Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 2009). 17

See Douglas B. Rasmussen and Douglas J. Den Uyl, The Norms of Liberty: A Perfectionist Basis for Non-

Perfectionist Politics (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005); Rasmusssen and Den Uyl,

Liberty and Nature: An Aristotelian Defense of Liberal Order (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1991); and Douglas J. Den

Uyl, The Virtue of Prudence (New York: Peter Lang, 1991). 18

See Frank Meyer, In Defense of Freedom and Related Essays (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1996). 19

Larry Arnhart, Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature (Albany: State University of

New York Press, 1998); Arnhart, Darwinian Conservatism: A Disputed Question, second enlarged edition, ed.

Kenneth Blanchard (Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2009).

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these twenty desires as part of human biological nature.20

We now have

anthropological evidence — surveyed by Donald Brown and others — that there

are hundreds of human universals, which are clustered around these twenty

desires.21

Psychologists who study human motivation across diverse cultures

recognize these desires as manifesting the basic motives for human action.

Rasmussen and Den Uyl identify the natural ends of human action as

corresponding to a list of generic goods that resembles my list of twenty natural

desires. Their list of generic goods includes health, beauty, wealth, honor,

friendship, justice, artistic pursuits, and intellectual pursuits.

My assertion that the good is the desirable will provoke a complaint from

some philosophers that I am overlooking the distinction between facts and values

or is and ought. They will insist that we cannot infer moral values from natural

facts. From the fact that we naturally desire something, they say, we cannot infer

that it is morally good for us to desire it.

But I would argue that there is no merely factual desire separated from

prescriptive desire, which would create the fact/value dichotomy. Whatever we

desire we do so because we judge that it is truly desirable for us. If we discover

that we are mistaken — because what we desire is not truly desirable for us — then

we are already motivated to correct our mistake. Much of Darwin’s discussion of

moral deliberation is about how human beings judge their desires in the light of

their past experiences and future expectations as they strive for the harmonious

satisfaction of their desires over a whole life, and much of this moral and

intellectual deliberation turns on the experience of regret when human beings

realize that they have yielded to a momentary desire that conflicts with their more

enduring desires.22

Whenever a moral philosopher tells us that we ought to do something, we

can always ask, “Why?” The only ultimate answer to that question is because it’s

desirable for you — it will fulfill you or make you happy by contributing to your

human flourishing.

But even if we know what is generally or generically good for human

beings, this does not tell us what is good for particular individuals in particular

circumstances. Although the twenty natural desires constitute the universal goods

of human life, the best organization or ranking of those desires over a whole life

varies according to individual temperaments and social situations. So, for

example, a philosophic life in which the natural desire for intellectual

20

Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2nd

ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 2004);

Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 3rd

ed., with an Introduction, Afterword, and

Commentaries by Paul Ekman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 21

See Donald Brown, Human Universals (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991). 22

See Darwin, Descent of Man, 132-40.

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understanding ranks higher than other desires is best for Socrates and those like

him, but not for others.

Evolutionary biology allows us to generalize about natural desires as the

universals of evolved human nature. And yet evolutionary biology also teaches us

that every individual organism is unique. After all, the Darwinian theory of

evolution requires individual variation. Even identical twins are not really

identical. Evolutionary biology also teaches us that human evolutionary

adaptations enable flexible responses to the variable circumstances of the physical

and social environment, which is why the human brain has evolved to respond

flexibly to the unique life history of each individual.

If there is no single way of life that is best for all individuals in all

circumstances, then the problem for any human community is how to organize

social life so that individuals can pursue their diverse conceptions of happiness

without coming into conflict. And since human beings are naturally social

animals, their individual pursuit of happiness requires communal engagement.

Allowing human beings to live together as children, parents, spouses, friends,

associates, and citizens without imposing one determinate conception of the best

way of life on all individuals is what Rasmussen and Den Uyl identify as

“liberalism’s problem.”

Liberalism’s solution to this problem is to distinguish between the political

order of the state as protecting individual liberty and the moral order of society as

shaping virtuous character. While a liberal political community does not enforce

one determinate conception of the human good, it does enforce procedural norms

of peaceful conduct that secure the freedom of individuals to form families, social

groups, and cooperative enterprises that manifest their diverse conceptions of the

human good.

Cultural Traditions Natural desires constrain but do not determine cultural traditions. If I am right

about my list of twenty natural desires, this constitutes a universal standard for

what is generally good for human beings by nature, and we can judge cultural

traditions by how well they conform to these natural desires. So, for example, we

can judge the utopian socialist traditions to be a failure, because their attempts to

abolish private property and private families have frustrated some of the strongest

desires of evolved human nature. We can also judge that political traditions of

limited government that channel and check political ambition are adapted for

satisfying the natural desire of dominant individuals for political rule, while also

satisfying the natural desire of subordinate individuals to be free from exploitation.

But cultural traditions like socialism and limited government arise as spontaneous

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orders of human cultural evolution that are not precisely determined by genetic

nature or by individual judgment.

Recognizing that natural desires constrain but do not determine cultural

traditions, Darwinian liberalism avoids the mistaken assumption of biological

determinism that biology is everything, culture nothing, while also avoiding the

mistaken assumption of cultural relativism that culture is everything, biology

nothing.

The interaction of human nature and human culture is manifest in the

cultivation of moral and intellectual character through the spontaneous order of

civil society. Classical liberals believe that while we need the coercive powers of

the state to secure those individual rights of liberty that are the conditions for a free

society, we need the natural and voluntary associations of civil society to secure

the moral order of our social life. The associations within civil society — families,

churches, clubs, schools, fraternal societies, business organizations, and so on —

allow us to pursue our diverse conceptions of the good life in cooperation with

others who share our moral understanding.

Darwin showed how this moral order of civil society arises from the natural

and cultural history of the human species. The need of human offspring for

prolonged and intensive parental care favors the moral emotions of familial

bonding, and thus people tend to cooperate with their kin. The evolutionary

advantages of mutual aid favor moral emotions sustaining mutual cooperation.

And the benefits of reciprocal exchange favors moral emotions sustaining a sense

of reciprocity, because one is more likely to be helped by others if one has helped

others in the past and has the reputation for being helpful.

“Ultimately,” Darwin concluded, “our moral sense or conscience becomes a

highly complex sentiment — originating in the social instincts, largely guided by

the approbation of our fellow-men, ruled by reason, self-interest, and in later times

by deep religious feelings, and confirmed by instruction and habit.”23

Recent

research in evolutionary psychology has confirmed and deepened this Darwinian

understanding of moral order that arises in civil society through the spontaneous

order of human action rather than the coercive order of governmental design.

Individual Judgments Natural desires and cultural traditions constrain but do not determine individual

judgments. Consequently, an evolutionary social science must move through three

levels of analysis—the natural history of the species, the cultural history of a

23

Darwin, Descent of Man, 157.

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community, and the biographical history of individuals.24

Classical liberals

recognize that the human good or human flourishing is complex in conforming to

the natural ends, the cultural circumstances, and the individual choices of human

life. Our shared human nature gives us a universal range of natural desires that

constitute the generic goods of life. Our diverse human cultures give us a

multiplicity of moral traditions that shape our social life. But ultimately

individuals must choose a way of life that they judge as best conforming to their

natural desires, social circumstances, and individual temperaments. For that

reason, liberals believe that the fundamental human right is liberty of judgment or

conscience.

Darwinian moral psychology explains the evolutionary history of the human

capacity for individual moral judgment. Most recently, neuroscience has begun to

uncover the emotional, social, and cognitive capacities of the brain that make

moral judgment possible. For example, while Darwin explained the evolutionary

importance of sympathy for human moral experience, contemporary

neuroscientists have studied the neural circuitry in the brains of human beings and

other primates that allow individual animals to imaginatively project themselves

into the experiences of other individuals.25

As I have indicated, my main claim is that Darwinian evolutionary science

supports the fundamental idea of liberalism that social order is a largely self-

regulating unintended order that emerges from the interaction of individuals

pursuing their individual desires. In support of this claim, I will elaborate the five

ways in which Darwinism sustains an evolutionary liberalism as based on the

evolution of a moral anthropology (sec. 1), the evolution of self-ownership,

property, and mammalian sociality (sec. 2), the evolution of exchange and the

division of labor (sec. 3), the evolution of limited government (sec. 4), and the

evolution of declining violence (sec. 5),

24

See Larry Arnhart, “Biopolitical Science,” in James E. Fleming and Sanford Levinson, eds., Evolution and

Morality (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 221-65; and Arnhart, “The Grandeur of Biopolitical

Science,” Perspectives on Politics 11 (June 2013): 500-503. 25

See Joshua D. Greene, “The Cognitive Neuroscience of Moral Judgment,” in Michael Gazzaniga, ed., The

Cognitive Neurosciences, 4th

ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 987-99; Tania Singer and Susanne Leiberg,

“Sharing the Emotions of Others: The Neural Basis of Empathy,” in Gazzaniga, Cognitive Neuroscience, 973-86;

and Roland Zahn, Ricardo de Oliveira-Souza, and Jorge Moll, “The Neuroscience of Moral Cognition and

Emotion,” in Jean Decety and John T. Cacioppo, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Social Neuroscience (New York:

Oxford University Press, 2011), 477-90.

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1. THE EVOLUTION OF MORAL ANTHROPOLOGY

The liberal idea of society as a largely self-regulating unintended order assumes

that morality can arise as a spontaneous order from the social interaction of human

individuals seeking to satisfy their individual desires. Smith elaborates this liberal

view of morality in his Theory of Moral Sentiments. This breaks with the

traditional Western idea that moral order must conform to a transcendental cosmic

order—the moral law of a cosmic God, a cosmic Reason, or a cosmic Nature.

Instead of this transcendental moral cosmology, liberal morality is founded on an

empirical moral anthropology, in which moral order arises from within human

experience. Darwinian science supports this liberal moral anthropology by

showing how it arises from the coevolution of human nature, human culture, and

human judgment.

From Plato to Lucretius

Beginning with Plato’s Timaeus and Laws, Western culture has been dominated by

the thought that the best order of human life must be an imitation of an intelligently

designed cosmic order, so that human life belongs to a “Great Chain of Being,” in

which human beings look up to the eternal cosmic order of God, Nature, or

Reason.26

If this is true, then the moral order of a political community requires the

coercive enforcement of belief in a cosmology of intelligent design like that

prescribed by the Athenian Stranger in Book 10 of Plato’s Laws. As it was later

filtered through the tradition of Biblical religion, this intelligent design cosmology

dictated the legal and political enforcement of a religious orthodoxy conforming to

God’s law.27

Consequently, the liberal argument for individual liberty and limited

government could never fully prevail until there was a persuasive alternative to the

moral cosmology of intelligent design. For example, when John Locke argued for

religious liberty secured through religious toleration, he was attacked by those who

assumed that social order required the governmental enforcement of religious

orthodoxy; and even Locke himself could not justify tolerating atheists, because he

warned that denying the existence of God as the Creator of human beings and of

the moral law dissolved the moral bonds of human society.28

In contrast to the moral cosmology of Plato, there was another intellectual

tradition in ancient Greece that explained social order not as rooted in an

26

See Remi Brague, The Wisdom of the World: The Human Experience of the Universe in Western Thought

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History

of an Idea (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936); and C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to

Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964). 27

See Remi Brague, The Law of God: The Philosophical History of an Idea (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

2008). 28

John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration and Other Writings (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2010).

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intelligently designed metaphysical or theological order but as rooted in a

spontaneous order of human biological and historical evolution. In this tradition,

thinkers such as Democritus, Protagoras, Antiphon, and Lycophron developed a

science of evolutionary anthropology supporting the liberal idea of society as a

self-generating, self-enforcing, and unintended order.29

According to this Greek

liberal view, society arises from bonds of kinship, reciprocal cooperation, and the

mutual gains of economic exchange, and it enforces the legal protection of its

members from violence.30

This liberal social thought was associated with a materialist cosmology of

atomism developed by Democritus and elaborated by Epicurus and Lucretius. The

fullest surviving text of this intellectual tradition is Lucretius’s philosophical poem

On the Nature of Things (De rerum natura). Written near the middle of the first

century B.C., Lucretius' book was a poetic exposition of the philosophical atomism

of Epicurus. Although Epicurus and Lucretius professed to believe in the existence

of gods, they argued that the gods were immortal but natural beings who had no

care for human beings, and who never interfered with the natural order of the

cosmos. That natural cosmic order was explained as the product of atomic

particles combining and dissolving by chance and material necessity. As part of

that natural motion of atoms, human beings were purely material beings--in their

bodies and their minds--and as such they were mortal. Religious beliefs in the

immortality of the soul and an afterlife in which those immortal souls were to be

eternally rewarded or punished should be recognized as delusions. Indeed, those

delusions based on religious fears were the primary source of human anxiety. To

be happy, to be able to enjoy the pleasures of mortal life, human beings needed to

overcome their fear of death and of divine judgment. They could do that, Epicurus

and Lucretius believed, by understanding the way things really are as a product of

the evolutionary history of the world as atoms in motion.

This materialist cosmology of Epicureanism was a radical alternative to the

other views of cosmic order in the ancient Greek and Roman world--including

Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Stoicism. While many of the early Christian

theologians could accommodate modified forms of Platonism, Aristotelianism, and

Stoicism as compatible with Christianity, they had to reject Epicurean materialism

as utterly contrary to Christianity. The Christian fear of the Satanic temptation of

Epicureanism was so deep that the writings of Epicurus and Lucretius were hidden

away and largely disappeared from medieval Christendom.

29

See Eric A. Havelock, The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1964), 5-6,

17, 26-31, 34, 44-45, 49, 57-58, 66, 71-77, 104-105, 109-10, 114, 117, 125, 136, 170, 292, 299, 317, 378, 395, 407-

410. 30

Havelock, Liberal Temper, 372-75; Aristotle, Politics, 1280a30-b32.

15

When Poggio Bracciolini discovered a copy of Lucretius’s poem in a

monastic library in southern Germany in 1417, that marked the beginning of

modern liberalism, if not the beginning of the modern world in general, at least

insofar as modernity can be understood as a product of the turn away from the

Platonic and Christian cosmology of intelligent design to the Epicurean and

Lucretian cosmology of evolutionary atomism.31

Remarkably, even Leo Strauss,

who insisted on the modernity of liberalism in contrast to ancient political thought,

recognized how far Lucretius had gone in anticipating modern liberalism.32

One can see the fundamental agreement between Lucretius and Darwin in

their general cosmology of a world in which the complex unintended order of the

living world arises through a natural evolutionary process that does not require

special creation by an intelligent designer.33

As part of this Epicurean view of

evolution, the moral order of human life arises from within human evolution itself

without any reference to the cosmic order, because the cosmos has no moral

design. As described by Lucretius, the world arises from the motion of atoms

without the intervention of any ordering or purposeful mind, and out of this

spontaneously evolving world, the human species emerges as (in Strauss’s words)

“the whole source of purposefulness in the universe.”34

Moral order thus depends

on a moral anthropology rather than a moral cosmology.

Ludwig von Mises saw classical liberalism as rooted in Epicureanism. In

contrast to the “holistic and metaphysical view of society,” Mises observed, the

Epicurean liberal sees social order not as an intelligently designed imposition by

the state conforming to some cosmic or theological conception of the Good, but as

an evolved order of spontaneous rules devised by individuals acting for their own

ends. That spontaneous moral order arises through a tacit agreement to

cooperation for mutual benefit.35

This idea was anticipated by Epicurus: “Natural

justice is a pledge of reciprocal usefulness, that is, neither to harm one another nor

be harmed.”36

31

See Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York: Norton, 2011); Benjamin

Wiker, Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2002); and Alison

Brown, The Return of Lucretius to Renaissance Florence (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010). 32

Leo Strauss, Liberalism: Ancient & Modern (New York: Basic Books, 1968), viii, 29, 31, 40, 85, 125-26, 135,

139 33

See Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, book 5, lines 837-877. 34

Strauss, Liberalism, 123, 126. Compare Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1953), 94 35

Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, third revised edition (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1966), 15, 145-

47. 36

Epicurus, The Epicurus Reader: Selected Writings, ed. Brad Inwood and Lloyd Gerson (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett

Publishing, 1994), 5.31.

16

Smith’s Marketplace of Life

The Scottish philosophers of the eighteenth century—particularly, David Hume

and Adam Smith—renewed this liberal evolutionary tradition. One can see this in

the fundamental idea running through all of Smith's writing--the evolution of

unintended order—as supporting Smithian liberalism, or what Smith called "the

system of natural liberty."

That the evolution of unintended order is the unifying theme of all of Smith's

writing has been well stated by James Otteson in his book Adam Smith’s

Marketplace of Life. He argues that Smith applies a "market model" to explain the

origin, development, and maintenance of all extended human institutions as

unintended orders. What he calls "unintended order" is what Michael Polanyi and

Hayek call "spontaneous order" and what Vernon Smith and others call "emergent

order." Otteson defines "unintended order" as "a self-enforcing, orderly institution

created unintentionally by the free exchanges of individuals who desire to satisfy

their own individual wants."37

An unintended order is contrasted with an intentional order that has been

rationally designed by some mind or group of minds for a deliberately planned

purpose. The contrast between these two kinds of order underlies a fundamental

debate in social theory between constructivists and evolutionists: constructivists

think that a good social order must be deliberately and rationally designed for some

foreseeable end-state, while evolutionists think a good social order arises through a

process of free exchanges between individuals acting for individual ends with no

overall end in mind. Since the success of unintended order depends on individual

liberty constrained only by rules of justice protecting life, liberty, and property, the

idea of unintended order is the fundamental idea of classical liberalism in the

Smithian tradition.

The importance of unintended order for explaining economic markets in

Smith's Wealth of Nations is generally recognized. But what is not generally

recognized is how this same idea runs throughout Smith's writing. Otteson

presents this as an analytical model with four elements, which he applies not only

to The Wealth of Nations but also to The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith's

essay on the origin of languages, his Lectures on Jurisprudence, and his essay on

the history of astronomy.

The four elements of the model are (1) a motivating desire, (2) rules

developed, (3) currency (what gets exchanged), and (4) the resulting unintended

system of order. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the motivating desire is the

“pleasure of mutual sympathy” of sentiments.38

The rules developed are the

standards of moral judgment. The currency is constituted by personal sentiments 37

James Otteson, Adam Smith’s Marketplace of Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 270. 38

Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1982), 13.

17

and moral judgments exchanged between individuals. The resulting unintended

system of order is the system of morality. In The Wealth of Nations, the

motivating desire is the “natural effort of every individual to better his own

condition.”39

The rules developed are the “laws of justice,” including laws

protecting private property, contractual agreements, and voluntary exchanges.40

The currency is constituted by the goods and services that are exchanged. The

resulting unintended system of order is the economy as a large-scale network of

exchanges of goods and services. In Smith’s essay on the origin of languages, the

motivating desire is the desire to make “mutual wants intelligible to each other.”41

The rules developed are the rules of grammar, pronunciation, and so on. The

currency is constituted by words, ideas, and wants that are exchanged through

communication. The resulting unintended system of order is language itself.

Since each unintended order expresses a motivating desire, there is an

implicit assumption that the good is the desirable, and thus the natural desires

constitute the natural goods for human life. These unintended orders are thereby

rooted in an implied hypothetical imperative of human evolutionary experience: if

you want to live a desirable life, a happy or flourishing life, then you should

participate in those unintended orders that help you do that. Understood in this

way, these unintended orders have no transcendental claims to conform to any

cosmic order or to instantiate any categorical imperative. Rather, they emerge out

of the human experience of individuals striving to satisfy their natural desires.

One can see here what Michael Frazer has called Smith’s “reflective liberal

sentimentalism.”42

Frazer argues that while the distinctive demand of

Enlightenment liberalism was reflective autonomy--the freedom to reflect for

ourselves in determining our moral and political standards--the Enlightenment

thinkers disagreed about the character of this reflective autonomy. The

Enlightenment rationalists (like Immanuel Kant in his later years) assumed that

autonomy required the rule of reason over emotion and imagination, because the

true self was identified as pure reason. The Enlightenment sentimentalists (like

Hume and Smith) assumed that autonomy required reflective choices by the mind

as a whole, including not only reason but also emotion and imagination, because

the true self was understood as embracing the whole human mind.

Frazer's aim is to revive the tradition of Enlightenment sentimentalism as

superior to Enlightenment rationalism, and to indicate how recent research in

evolutionary social psychology and social neuroscience supports reflective

39

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1981), 26-27, 341, 343, 540. 40

Smith, Wealth of Nations, 687. 41

Adam Smith, “Considerations Concerning the First Formation of Languages,” in Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles

Lettres (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1985), 203. 42

Michael Frazer, The Enlightenment of Sympathy: Justice and the Moral Sentiments in the Eighteenth Century and

Today (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

18

sentimentalism. He uses the term "reflective sentimentalism" to indicate that

sentimentalists are not arguing for enslaving reason to emotion, because they are

actually arguing for autonomy as the activity of the whole human mind, in which

the mind can reflect rationally on itself and thus refine its emotional responses to

the world by judging those responses as reasonable or unreasonable. We can

reflect on whether our moral sentiments are contradictory or consistent, whether

they rest on true or false judgments, and whether they promote or impede our

happiness.

I would identify the Enlightenment rationalists as following in the Platonic

tradition of moral cosmology and the Enlightenment sentimentalists as following

in the Epicurean tradition of moral anthropology. What Frazer says in defense of

Smith's reflective liberal sentimentalism coincides with what I would say in

defense of Darwinian liberalism. As the naturally social animals that we are, we

have evolved propensities to care about our fellow human beings, a care that is

expressed as sympathy or empathy. Through sympathy, we judge others and judge

ourselves as we appear in the eyes of others, judgments that are expressed as moral

sentiments of approbation or disapprobation. When we see people suffering unfair

injuries, we sympathize with their suffering and share their resentment against

those who have injured them, because we have imaginatively projected ourselves

into their situations. That resentment against injustice is the natural ground of

rights, because we derive rights from wrongs: human beings have the right not to

be injured in ways that would elicit our moral resentment.43

Darwinian evolutionary biology can explain the evolution of these moral and

intellectual capacities. Darwinian psychology and neuroscience can explain the

proximate causes of our judgments in our neurophysiological constitution. This

then provides scientific confirmation of reflective sentimentalism.

This reflective sentimentalism is liberal because it recognizes the natural

separateness of individuals and the moral claims that individuals make. As

members of the same human species, we share those general propensities or

generic natural desires that constitute our human nature. But we also are unique in

our identities as individuals with personal temperaments and social histories. For

the harmony of society, there must be some shared experiences between

individuals based on sympathy. But sympathy can never be perfect in the sense of

being a complete unity of spectator and actor, because this would deny the separate

identity of the two individuals. "Though they will never be unisons," Smith

observed, "they may be concords, and this is all that is wanted or required."44

43

See Alan Dershowitz, Rights from Wrongs: A Secular Theory of the Origins of Rights (New York: Basic Books,

2004). 44

Smith, Moral Sentiments, I.i.4.8.

19

This reflective sentimentalism as rooted purely in human experience does

not need any grounding in any cosmic order beyond human life. But some of

Smith’s readers have not been satisfied with this moral anthropology. For

example, Otteson wants to find some cosmic normativity in Smith's teaching. But

this creates a big problem in Otteson's interpretation of Smith's "marketplace of

life." As we have seen, Otteson presents the evolution of unintended order as the

pervasive theme in Smith's explanation of social order--including morals, markets,

languages, laws, and the sciences. But then Otteson argues that Smith does not

extend this kind of explanation to cosmic nature or human nature, which require

explanation through intelligent design by God. The very possibility of unintended

order presupposes a certain constitution of human nature and certain recurrent

circumstances of social life--such as the natural desires for mutual sympathy and

for bettering oneself. This presupposes an order of nature, including human nature,

that cannot itself be explained as unintended order, Otteson suggests, and it shows

evidence of intentional design by an intelligent, benevolent, and omnipotent God.

Otteson can supply plenty of textual evidence for this from The Theory of Moral

Sentiments, because Smith often refers to God, the Deity, or the Author of Nature

as ordering nature to His benevolent ends.45

Otteson thinks this intelligent-design theology serves two purposes for

Smith's account of morality. People are more likely to obey the most important

moral rules if those rules are regarded as sacred duties. And if morality is

understood as rooted in divine commands manifested in the cosmic structure of

nature and human nature, then morality takes on a transcendent character, because

it is based not just on hypothetical imperatives of human experience but categorical

imperatives inherent in the cosmic order of things.

Otteson acknowledges that many scholarly interpreters dismiss Smith's

theological language as a rhetorical appeal to popular religious beliefs that Smith

himself did not share. Otteson rejects this position by pointing to the language of

moral theology in The Theory of Moral Sentiment. But while this textual evidence

does seem to support Otteson's interpretation, Otteson ignores the evidence from

Smith's intellectual friendship with David Hume and the threat of religious

persecution that has led many scholars to conclude that Smith largely agreed with

Hume's skepticism, but he thought that he could not risk provoking religious

believers the way Hume had.

We should remember that as a condition for becoming a professor at the

University of Glasgow, Smith was forced to sign the Calvinist Confession of Faith

before the Presbytery of Glasgow. He was also required to start each of his classes

45

For other examples of those arguing for the importance of Smith’s theology, see Jacob Viner, The Role of

Providence in the Social Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976); and James Alvey, “The Secret,

Natural Theological Foundation of Adam Smith’s Work,” Journal of Markets and Morality, 7 (Fall 2004): 335-61.

20

with a prayer, and his request for an exemption from this requirement was refused.

We should also remember that Smith was very close to his mother, with whom he

lived, and being a pious woman, she would have been offended by any public

declaration of doubt about religion. After her death in 1784, Smith revised the

sixth and last edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and many of his revisions

either struck out or muted some of the theological passages of the earlier editions.46

Consider also that in The Wealth of Nations, Smith never mentions God, treats

religious groups as purely secular institutions for popular education, and condemns

the corrupting effect that theology has had upon moral and natural philosophy.47

When Hume was dying, there was intense public interest in the possibility

that the great atheist--who had denied the immortality of the soul and the judgment

of souls in the afterlife--would show his fear of death and divine judgment. Smith

wrote a long letter to William Strahan (November 9, 1776) describing Hume's

illness and death and presenting him as facing death with tranquillity. He

concluded: "Upon the whole, I have always considered him, both in his lifetime

and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and

virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit."48

This provoked a great controversy in the press, and Smith was denounced as

an infidel. A few years later, in a letter to Andreas Holt (October 26, 1780), Smith

lamented: "A single, and as, I thought a very harmless Sheet of paper, which I

happened to Write concerning the death of our late friend Mr. Hume, brought upon

me ten times more abuse than the very violent attack I had made upon the whole

commercial system of Great Britain."49

Before his death, Hume asked Smith to take the manuscript of his Dialogues

Concerning Natural Religion and supervise its publication. Smith promised to

preserve the manuscript, but he did not want it to be published in his own lifetime,

presumably because he feared the persecution it would provoke. In the Dialogues,

Hume wrote a devastating attack on the reasoning for natural theology, employing

some of the arguments first formulated by the Epicureans. He also suggested that

the apparent design of the universe could be explained by undesigned,

unintentional processes of nature, and some of what he said looks remarkably like

what Darwin would develop later as his theory of evolution. Hume’s character

Philo suggested that the emergence of complex order in the physical and living

world could be explained as the result of a process of natural selection of

accidental variations in the history of the world. And thus he anticipated Darwin's

46

See Gavin Kennedy, “The Hidden Adam Smith in His Alleged Theology,” Journal of the History of Economic

Thought, 33 (2011): 385-402. 47

Smith, Wealth of Nations, 764-74, 788-814. 48

Adam Smith, Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. Ernest Campbell Mossner and Ian Simpson Ross (Indianapolis,

IN: Liberty Fund, 1987), 221. 49

Smith, Correspondence, 251.

21

theory of natural evolution: Darwin specified what Hume had already suggested as

a theoretical possibility. Philo also indicated, however, that the ultimate first cause

of everything remains a mystery, which leaves an opening for believing in a

Creator as something like a Cosmic Mind.50

Otteson insists that while Darwin's evolutionary theory might provide an

alternative to intelligent design theology, this Darwinian theory was not available

to either Hume or Smith. While it is certainly right that neither Hume nor Smith

were able to elaborate anything like Darwin's theory, Hume did clearly foreshadow

the theory in the Dialogues; and even Smith has a few passages in The Theory of

Moral Sentiments where he speaks of species as naturally adapted for survival and

reproduction , and this looks like at least a vague foreshadowing of Darwin.51

Darwin agrees with Smith about how religious belief can be important for

reinforcing moral conduct. But he also thinks that religious belief is not absolutely

necessary for morality, which can stand on its own natural ground as rooted in our

evolved human nature. This position is important for liberalism, because religious

liberty--including the liberty of atheists and skeptics--can be defended only if we

see that there can be a common natural morality that does not require that religious

belief be coercively enforced.

Darwin also agrees with Smith that the mystery of the origin of the laws of

nature leaves an opening for religious belief in a Creator as First Cause. But even

so, Darwin would argue, we do not need special miraculous interventions by the

Creator to explain the origins of species, including the human species.

The new Darwinian social science would support Darwin on both of these

points. Darwinian science can explain the evolutionary psychology of religious

belief, but this by itself cannot refute the possibility that such belief is true.52

Darwinian science can also recognize role of religion in the evolution of morality,

but without denying the naturalness of morality even for those who are not

religious believers.53

On all of these points, Darwinian social science supports the

core of Smith's teaching about the evolution of unintended order and thus supports

the classical liberal tradition that grows out of that teaching.

We can conclude from this that in 1859, with the publication of Darwin's

Origin of Species, it became possible, for the first time, to be an intellectually

fulfilled Smithian liberal. Darwin's evolutionary theory made it possible to explain

50

David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, in Writings on Religion, ed. Antony Flew (LaSalle, IL:

Open Court, 1992), 217, 228-29, 240-42, 246-47, 261, 268, 270, 273, 277-78, 291-92 51

Smith, Moral Sentiments, 77, 142, 219. 52

See Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained (New York: Basic Books, 2001); Justin Barrett, Why Would Anyone Believe

in God? (Oxford: Altamira Press, 2004); and Jesse Bering, The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny,

and the Meaning of Life (New York: Norton, 2011). 53

See David Sloan Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 2002).

22

the biological origins of human nature as an unintended order that made possible

the largely self-regulating society arising unintentionally from the free exchanges

of individuals, which was the fundamental idea of Smithian liberalism.

By showing how all living species--including the human species--could have

evolved naturally, without any need for special creation by God, Darwin extended

the idea of unintended order to embrace the whole history of life, and thus he

allowed for moral order to be understood as a free-standing human order, as rooted

in moral anthropology rather than moral cosmology, without any necessary support

from a theology of intelligent design. This then made it safe for governments to

tolerate religious pluralism, and even atheism, without fear that the moral order of

society would collapse without a coercively enforced religious orthodoxy.

Darwin, Cobbe, and the Morality of Bees and Termites

The influence of Scottish moral anthropology on Darwin began as early as 1836,

when Darwin returned to England from his service as naturalist aboard H.M.S.

Beagle, and he began writing in a series of notebooks that would contain the ideas

that he would eventually elaborate in his theory of evolution. From the beginning,

he knew that explaining human evolution would require explaining the

spontaneous evolution of human morality as rooted in the moral emotions, moral

culture, and moral judgments of human beings as social mammals.54

His full published account of human moral evolution came in 1871 in The

Descent of Man. Darwin recognized the uniqueness of human morality. "Of all

the differences between man and the lower animals, the moral sense or conscience

is by far the most important."55

This moral sense is "summed up in that short but

imperious word ought," which is "the most noble of all the attributes of man,

leading him without a moment's hesitation to risk his life for that of a fellow-

creature; or after due deliberation, impelled simply by the deep feeling of right or

duty, to sacrifice it in some great cause." Darwin then quoted a remark by

Immanuel Kant: "Duty! Wondrous thought, that workest neither by fond

insinuation, flattery, nor by any threat, but merely by holding up thy naked law in

the soul, and so extorting for thyself always reverence, if not always obedience;

before whom all appetites are dumb, however secretly they rebel; whence thy

original?"

The quotation from Kant is from a passage in his Critique of Practical

Reason, which is immediately followed by a passage in which Kant writes about

the sense of duty or "ought" as showing us "man as belonging to two worlds"--the

54

Charles Darwin, Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836-1844, ed. Paul H. Barrett, Peter J. Gautrey, Sandra Herbert,

David Kohn, and Sydney Smith (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), 537, 558, 563-64, 619-629. 55

Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2nd

ed., ed. James Moore and Adrian

Desmond (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 120.

23

empirical (phenomenal) world of natural causes and the transcendental (noumenal)

world of moral freedom.56

By contrast, Darwin indicates that his explanation of

morality will be "exclusively from the side of natural history." A careful reader

might see here a fundamental difference between the Kantian approach that sees

morality as belonging to a transcendent world beyond the natural world and the

Darwinian approach that sees morality as belonging completely to "natural

history."

Darwin explained that human morality could have emerged through four

overlapping stages of evolution.57

First, social instincts led early human ancestors

to feel sympathy for others in their group, which promoted a tendency to mutual

aid. Second, the development of the intellectual faculties allowed these human

ancestors to perceive the conflicts between instinctive desires, so that they could

feel dissatisfaction at having yielded to a momentarily strong desire (like fleeing

from injury) in violation of some more enduring social instinct (like defending

one’s group). Third, the acquisition of language permitted the expression of social

opinions about good and bad, just and unjust, so that primitive human beings could

respond to praise and blame while satisfying their social instincts. Fourth, the

capacity for habit allowed individuals, through acquired dispositions, to act in

conformity to social norms. Darwin also stressed the importance of tribal warfare

in the development of morality: such contests spurred the development of the

intellectual and moral capacities that allow individuals to cooperate within groups

so as to compete successfully against other groups. “Ultimately,” he concluded,

“our moral sense or conscience becomes a highly complex sentiment—originating

in the social instincts, largely guided by the approbation of our fellow-men, ruled

by reason, self-interest, and in later times by deep religious feelings, and confirmed

by instruction and habit.”58

Darwin saw at least three general moral principles arising from this natural

moral sense in evolutionary history: kinship, mutuality, and reciprocity. The need

of human offspring for prolonged and intensive parental care would favor moral

emotions of familial bonding, and thus people would tend to cooperate with their

kin. The evolutionary advantages of mutual aid would favor moral emotions

sustaining mutual cooperation. And the benefits of reciprocal exchange would

favor moral emotions sustaining a sense of reciprocity, because one was more

likely to be helped by others if one had helped others in the past and had the

reputation for being helpful.

56

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs Merrill, 1956),

AA, 86-88. 57

Darwin, Descent, 120-22. 58

Darwin, Descent, 157.

24

Notice that Darwin does not appeal to any cosmic or transcendental moral

law, although he does see “deep religious feelings” as supporting the human moral

sense. Some of Darwin's first readers saw this, and many of them were deeply

disturbed by it. For example, Frances Cobbe wrote a review of the book--

"Darwinism in Morals"--for the Theological Review, in which she warned that

Darwin's rejection of the Kantian view of morality as transcending natural human

experience would destroy all morality.59

Cobbe saw a fundamental conflict between two views of morality.

"Independent or Intuitive morality has, of course, always taught that there is a

supreme and necessary moral law common to all free agents in the universe, and

known to man by means of a transcendental reason or divine voice of conscience.

Dependent or Utilitarian Morality has equally steadily rejected the idea of a law

other than the law of utility." Darwin clearly takes the second position. She

observed "that the Kantian doctrine of Pure Reason, giving us transcendental

knowledge of necessary truths, is not entertained by the school of thinkers to which

he belongs; and that as for the notion of all the old teachers of the world, the voice

of Conscience is the voice of God--the doctrine of Job and Zoroaster, Menu and

Pythagoras, Plato and Antonius, Chrysostom and Gregory, Fenelon and Jeremy

Taylor,--it can have no place in their science.” She complained that according to

Darwin, “there are no such things really as Right and Wrong; and our idea that

they have existence outside of our own poor little minds is pure delusion.”60

Darwin maintained that although the moral sense was unique to human

beings, it would be possible for evolutionary history to produce another species of

animal with a different kind of moral sense. "Any animal whatever, endowed with

well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included,

would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual

powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man." But the

content of the moral sense in such an animal would depend upon the desires and

needs of the animal. Darwin explained: "If, for instance, to take an extreme case,

men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly

be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a

sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile

daughters; and no one would think of interfering. Nevertheless, the bee, or any

other social animal, would gain in our supposed case, as it appears to me, some

feeling of right and wrong, or a conscience.”61

It seems, then, that the moral sense or conscience--the sense of moral

"ought"--is a "feeling of right or wrong" that varies according to the instinctive

59

Frances Power Cobbe, Darwinism in Morals, And Other Essays (London: Williams and Norgate, 1872), 1-33. 60

Cobbe, Darwinism in Morals, 5-7, 31. 61

Darwin, Descent, 122-23.

25

desires of the species. So far, the human moral sense is the only moral sense,

because human beings are the only animals with the evolved capacities for moral

judgment. But if any other species of animal were to evolve such moral capacities,

their moral sense would differ from the human moral sense depending upon the

differences in their instinctive desires.

Cobbe was appalled by this--by the claim that if bees had a moral sense, it

would prescribe a sacred duty for sisters to murder their brothers. She saw this as

"affirming that, not only has our moral sense come to us from a source

commanding no special respect, but that it answers to no external or durable, not to

say universal or eternal, reality, and is merely tentative and provisional, the

provincial prejudice, as we may describe it, of this little world and its temporary

inhabitants, which would be looked on with a smile of derision by better-informed

people now residing on Mars, or hereafter to be developed on earth, and who in

their turn may be considered as walking in a vain shadow by other races." She

warned: "Our moral sense, however acquired, does not, it is asserted, correspond to

anything real outside of itself, to any law which must be the same for all

Intelligences, mundane or supernal."62

Against what she perceived as Darwin's moral nihilism, Cobbe asserted that

ethics was a normative science just like geometry in that both ethics and geometry

were based on axiomatic principles that all intelligent beings could recognize as

necessary truths. "Love your neighbor" is such a necessary truth of morality, and

therefore any intelligent being should eventually understand that moral duty

dictates universal love, which would be as true for bees as for humans.

Other readers besides Cobbe--including George Jackson Mivart and even

Alfred Russel Wallace (the co-discoverer of the idea of natural selection)--warned

that Darwin's evolutionary account of morality denied the eternal truth of morality

as rooted in the transcendent cosmic order of God, Reason, or Nature. The same

warning is heard today from proponents of "intelligent design theory" (like John

West and Richard Weikart), who insist that morality cannot be sustained if it is not

grounded in some transcendent world of moral truth beyond the empirical world of

natural causes.63

Edward O. Wilson—the father of “sociobiology”--has observed that what

we see here is a fundamental debate between a transcendentalist view of morality

and an empiricist view—“between transcendentalists, those who think that moral

guidelines exist outside the human mind, and empiricists, who think them

62

Cobbe, Darwinism in Morals, 28. 63

See John West, Darwin’s Conservatives: The Misguided Quest (Seattle, WA: Discovery Institute Press, 2006);

and Stephen Dilley, ed., Darwinian Evolution and Classical Liberalism: Theories in Tension (Lanham, MD:

Lexington Books, 2013).

26

contrivances of the mind.”64

On the transcendentalist side of this debate, Wilson

suggests, are those like Kant and John Rawls. On the empiricist side, are those like

Hume, Smith, and Darwin.

In defending the empiricist view, Wilson follows Darwin’s example in

imagining how the moral evolution of social insects could have diverged from

human moral evolution. Wilson speculates that if termites had evolved larger

brains to give them capacities for thought, language, and culture comparable to

human beings, we could imagine the Dean of the Faculty at the International

Termite University giving a commencement address and declaring:

Since our ancestors, the macrotermitine termites, achieved 10-

kilogram weight and larger brains during their rapid evolution through

the later Tertiary period and learned to write with pheromone script,

termitistic scholarship has refined ethical philosophy. It is now

possible to express the deontological imperatives of moral behavior

with precision. These imperatives are mostly self-evident and

universal. They are the very essence of termitity. They include the

love of darkness and of the deep, saprophytic, basidiomycetic

penetralia of the soil; the centrality of colony life amidst a richness of

war and trade among colonies; the sanctity of the physiological caste

system; the evil of personal reproduction by worker castes; the

mystery of deep love for reproductive siblings, which turns to hatred

the instant they mate; rejection of the evil of personal rights; the

infinite aesthetic pleasures of pheromonal song; the aesthetic pleasure

eating from nestmates' anuses after the shedding of the skin; the joy of

cannibalism and surrender of the body for consumption when sick or

injured (it is more blessed to be eaten than to eat); and much more . . .

Some termitistically inclined scientists, particularly the

ethologists and sociobiologists, argue that our social organization is

shaped by our genes and that our ethical precepts simply reflect the

peculiarities of termite evolution. They assert that ethical philosophy

must take into account the structure of the termite brain and the

evolutionary history of the species. Socialization is genetically

channeled, and some forms of it all but inevitable.

This proposal has created a major academic controversy. Many

scholars in the social sciences and termitities, refusing to believe that

termite nature can be better understood by a study of fishes and

baboons, have withdrawn behind the moat of philosophical dualism

and reinforced the crenellated parapets of the formal refutation of the

64

Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Norton, 1998), 238.

27

naturalistic fallacy. They consider the mind to be beyond the reach of

materialistic biological research. A few take the extreme view that

conditioning can alter termite culture and ethics in almost any

direction desired. But the biologists respond that termite behavior can

never be altered so far as to resemble that of, say, human beings.

There is such a thing as a biologically based termite nature.65

Wilson explains: "I have concocted this termitocentric fantasy to illustrate a

generalization strangely difficult to explain by conventional means: that human

beings possess a species-specific nature and morality, which occupy only a tiny

section in the space of all possible social and moral conditions."

For Wilson, this shows that there are no moral truths written into the order of

the cosmos that are justifiable to any thinking being. "Human beings possess a

species-specific nature and morality." And, similarly, any nonhuman animal with

cognitive capacities for moral reasoning would arrive at whatever moral

imperatives were suited for its species-specific nature. So, for example, rational

termites would reject "the evil of personal rights,” but human beings might well

conclude that personal rights are necessary for human social order.

This debate between a transcendentalist moral cosmology and an empiricist

moral anthropology was manifest in the debate between Kirk and Hayek.

Hayek’s Evolutionary Liberalism

Kirk had stated his metaphysical and religious version of conservatism in 1953 in

his book The Conservative Mind. The first canon of conservative thought, he

declared, was "belief that a divine intent rules society as well as conscience,

forging an eternal chain of right and duty which links great and obscure, living and

dead." Consequently, "politics is the art of apprehending and applying the Justice

which is above nature." In later formulations of this first canon, Kirk spoke of the

conservative belief in "a transcendent moral order." In all of his formulations, he

connected this principle to "Burke's description of the state as a divinely ordained

moral essence, a spiritual union of the dead, the living, and those yet unborn," and

he spoke of Burke's view of history as "the unfolding of Design." He mentioned

various schools of thought opposed to this conservative thinking, including "those

scientific doctrines, Darwinism chief among them, which have done so much to

undermine the first principles of a conservative order."66

Here in Kirk we see the

65

Edward O. Wilson, In Search of Nature (1996), 97-99; Wilson, Consilience, 148. 66

Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1953);

Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, 7th

revised ed. (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 1985), 8-

11; Kirk, Introduction, in The Portable Conservative Reader, ed. Russell Kirk (New York: Penguin Books, 1982),

xv.

28

common fear of many conservatives that Darwinian science denies a conservative

order by denying the religious belief in a transcendental order of moral law.

Since Hayek accepted Darwinian science but doubted the existence of God,

this was one of his reasons for disagreeing with Kirk's conservatism. This led

Hayek to insist that he was not really a "conservative" at all, but rather a "liberal"

in the classical tradition of Burke and the Old Whigs. He objected to the

"obscurantism" of a conservative attitude that rejected Darwin's theory of evolution

as morally corrupting, and thus failed to see how the moral order of society could

emerge as an unintended outcome of “spontaneous evolution.”

He elaborated his view of Burkean liberalism as belonging to a British

empiricist evolutionary tradition contrasted with a French rationalistic design

tradition. In the evolutionary tradition of Hume, Smith, and Burke, Hayek

explained, "it was shown that an evident order which was not the product of a

designing human intelligence need not therefore be ascribed to the design of a

higher, supernatural intelligence, but that there was a third possibility—the

emergence of order as the result of adaptive evolution." He then suggested that

Darwin's theory of biological evolution was derived from the theories of social

evolution developed by the Scottish philosophers.67

Hayek described his classical liberalism as based on a philosophical

skepticism. Rejecting the "mysticism" of the conservative, the classical liberal

skeptic is willing "to face his ignorance and to admit how little we know, without

claiming the authority of supernatural sources of knowledge where his reason fails

him." Still, "true liberalism has no quarrel with religion," because classical liberals

can be religious believers, and they respect religion as a "guardian of tradition" in

so far as the natural or cultural evolution of religious belief has preserved

beneficial moral habits.68

In his opening address to the first meeting of the Mont

Pèlerin Society in 1947, Hayek had insisted that “unless this breach between true

liberal and religious convictions can be healed, there is no hope for a revival of

liberal forces.”69

Hayek’s Denial of Instinct

In contrast to Kirk’s metaphysical conservatism, Hayek defended an evolutionary

liberalism founded in Darwinian science. I have argued that a Darwinian account

of social and moral order must see such order as the joint product of instinctive

evolution, cultural evolution, and rational choice, in such a way that the intended

67

Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago; University of Chicago Press, 1960), 54-61, 404-408 68

Hayek, Constitution of Liberty, 406-407; Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 1988), 136-37. 69

Friedrich Hayek, The Fortunes of Liberalism: Essays on Austrian Economics and the Ideal of Freedom, ed. Peter

G. Klein (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 244.

29

order of rational choice is constrained but not determined by the unintended orders

of instinctive evolution and cultural evolution. Although Hayek came close to

recognizing this Darwinian explanation of the complex interaction of instinct,

culture, and reason, he never quite got it right.

In his Hobhouse Lecture delivered at the London School of Economics in

1978, Hayek spoke about “The Three Sources of Human Values,” which, he said,

expressed most directly his “general view of moral and political evolution.”70

The

fundamental problem in his Hobhouse Lecture is indicated by the contrast between

the title of the lecture and the text of the lecture. The title indicates that “human

values” have “three sources,” and as the lecture indicates, these three sources are

natural instincts, cultural traditions, and rational deliberation. But in the text of the

lecture, Hayek contradicts this thought by arguing that cultural tradition alone, in

opposition to nature and reason, is the only true source of value—or, at least, the

only true basis for the goods that arise in “the open society of free men.”

Hayek insists that “what has made men good is neither nature nor reason but

tradition.” He explains: “That neither what is instinctively recognized as right, nor

what is rationally recognized as serving specific purposes, but inherited traditional

rules, or that what is neither instinct nor reason but tradition should often be most

beneficial to the functioning of society, is a truth which the dominant

constructivistic outlook of our times refuses to accept.”71

Hayek is right to reject

the simple dichotomy between nature and reason as the two sources of social and

moral order, because this ignores the place of custom or habit as that which comes

“between instinct and reason.”72

But I cannot see why he then has to so elevate

customary tradition over nature and reason that tradition becomes the only source

of morality and social order for human beings. It would be more sensible to say

that moral and social order arises through the coevolution of human nature, human

culture, and human reason.

In the Hobhouse Lecture, Hayek argues that "freedom is an artefact of

civilization" that requires the "repression" of the innate desires and emotions of the

human mind as shaped by genetic evolution for life in hunter-gatherer bands or

tribes.73

The neural structures of Homo sapiens were adapted for life in small

groups of foraging individuals. In such a face-to-face society, social order was

deliberately organized to satisfy the needs of the known and recognizable members

70

Friedrich Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty, vol. 3: The Political Order of a Free People (Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 1979), xi, 153-76. 71

Hayek, Political Order, 160, 162. 72

This rejection of instinct versus reason as a false dichotomy that ignores the place of custom is a persistent theme

in Hayek’s writing. See, for example, Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty, vol. 1: Rules and Order (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1973), 20-21; and The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1988), 6-28, 143-47. 73

Hayek, Political Order of a Free People, 155, 161, 163-64.

30

of the group. By contrast to this prehistoric life in small foraging groups, the

advent first of agriculture and then of settled urban life has made possible--over the

past 5,000 years--an expansion of social life through trade with distant strangers,

which creates an abstract society governed by abstract rules. Eventually, the

ancient Greeks discovered how individual liberty and private property made

possible the civilization of free men. The modern liberal capitalist society

continues the cultural evolution of freedom that began in ancient Athens.

Yet Hayek thinks this civilization of free individuals is painful for human

beings because it represses the genetic instincts and desires of the human brain as

adapted for life in small primitive groups. "In consequence, the long-submerged

innate instincts have again surged to the top. Their demand for a just distribution

in which organized power is to be used to allocate to each what he deserves, is thus

strictly an atavism, based on primordial emotions."74

The demand for "social

justice"--for a distribution of resources according to individual need and merit--is

implicitly a demand to return to a primitive society. By contrast, a "free society"

cannot be a "just society," because the spontaneous order of market competition

and exchange does not allocate resources according to any shared standard of just

deserts. Consequently, socialism is appealing to human beings because it satisfies

our innate instincts for social justice.

This is the "Freudian" theme in Hayek's writing, because it follows the

argument of Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents that civilization requires that

human beings repress their animal instincts.75

This could also be called the

"Popperian" theme, because Hayek took it from Karl Popper's Open Society and Its

Enemies, in which the popular appeal of the "closed society" is explained as an

atavistic return to tribal morality based on personal relationships against the

impersonal and abstract relationships of life in the "open society."

Generally, Hayek defends the "free society," in which social order arises as

an evolutionary order from the unplanned interactions of individuals, and he rejects

the "planned society," in which the attempt is made to organize social life by the

deliberate design of one or a few minds. But he also suggests that a fully planned

society is at least possible in families and tribal groups:

Only in the small groups of primitive society can collaboration

between the members rest largely on the circumstance that at any one

moment they will know more or less the same particular

circumstances. Some wise men may be better at interpreting the

immediately perceived circumstances or at remembering things in

remote places unknown to the others. But the concrete events which

the individuals encounter in their daily pursuits will be very much the 74

Hayek, Political Order of a Free People, 165. 75

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1962).

31

same for all, and they will act together because the events they know

and the objectives at which they aim are more or less the same.

The situation is wholly different in the Great or Open Society

where millions of men interact and where civilization as we know it

has developed. . . . each member of society can have only a small

fraction of the knowledge possessed by all, and . . . each is therefore

ignorant of most of the facts on which the working of society rests.76

And yet Hayek also says that ethology and cultural anthropology have

shown that in both animal societies and primitive human societies, the structure of

social life is determined by the evolution of unconscious and instinctive rules of

conduct--for example, rules of parent-child bonding, social rank, and property--that

have not been explicitly and consciously formulated by deliberate design.

Moreover, the eventual formulation of such rules in human language depends upon

the evolution of language as a spontaneous order that has not been deliberately

designed.77

It seems then that primitive human beings and other social animals organize

their social lives according to abstract rules rooted in their evolutionary instincts.

"Men generally act in accordance with abstract rules in this sense long before they

can state them."78

So, contrary to what Hayek says about free society and

civilization as the repression of primitive instincts, the "abstract rules" of the

"abstract society" are cultural extensions of the social instincts manifest in

primitive societies, which permits an extension of cooperation to ever wider

groups.

The extension of cooperation in the "Great Society" to embrace millions of

individuals who are strangers to one another depends on expanding trading

networks. In some of his writing, Hayek suggests that trade arose for the first time

in human history five to ten thousand years ago with the invention of agriculture,

and thus the propensity to trade could not have been shaped by genetic evolution in

the history of primitive human ancestors. But this ignores the extensive evidence

for prehistoric trade--both within and between tribal groups--and for the evolution

of language and norms of reciprocity as facilitating trade among our hunting-

gathering ancestors. This would suggest the possibility that the expansion of

trading networks over the past five thousand years was the cultural extension of

innate propensities for trade.

Another problem for Hayek's Freudian/Popperian conception of the "open

society" as the repression of primitive instincts is that this ignores the ways in

which a liberal society allows for human beings to satisfy their desires for personal

76

Hayek, Rules and Order, 13-14. 77

Hayek, Rules and Order, 72-82. 78

Hayek, Constitution of Liberty, 148-49.

32

social bonding in civil society. A fundamental principle of liberal thought, as

Hayek emphasizes, is the importance of civil society as lying between the

individual and the state--a social realm in which human beings are free to express

their social needs through the natural bonds of family life and the voluntary

associations of life. This allows for human beings to satisfy their instinctive needs

for familial and social bonding in small groups comparable to those of their

hunting-gathering ancestors.

The social structures of civil society can satisfy the human instincts for face-

to-face social bonding in small groups bound together by traditional moral norms.

This is important for Hayek's distinction between "true individualism" and "false

individualism”:

That true individualism affirms the value of the family and all

the common efforts of the small community and group, that it believes

in local autonomy and voluntary associations, and that indeed its case

rests largely on the contention that much for which the coercive action

of the state is usually invoked can be done better by voluntary

collaboration need not be stressed further. There can be no greater

contrast to this than the false individualism which wants to dissolve

all these smaller groups into atoms, which have no cohesion other

than the coercive rules imposed by the state, and which tries to make

all social ties prescriptive, instead of using the state mainly as a

protection of the individual against the arrogation of coercive powers

by the smaller groups.

Quite as important for the functioning of an individualist

society as these smaller groupings of men are the traditions and

conventions which evolve in a free society and which, without being

enforceable, establish flexible but normally observed rules that make

the behavior of other people predictable to a high degree. The

willingness to submit to such rules, not merely so long as one

understands the reason for them but so long as one has no definite

reasons to the contrary, is the essential condition for the gradual

evolution and improvement of rules of social intercourse; and the

readiness ordinarily to submit to the products of a social process

which nobody has designed and the reasons for which nobody may

understand is also an indispensable condition if it is to be possible to

dispense with compulsion.79

Hayek sees this free society as emerging for the first time in the ancient

Greek world. In Greek antiquity, "freedom" originally meant "not being a slave"-- 79

Friedrich Hayek, Studies in the Abuse and Decline of Reason: Text and Documents, ed. Bruce Caldwell (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 2010), 66-67l.

33

that is, not being subject to the arbitrary will of a master. And, thus, we could say

that liberty or freedom could be understood as "the state in which a man is not

subject to coercion by the arbitrary will of another."80

But then Hayek leaves us wondering why human beings resist being

enslaved. If slavery is not natural, if normal human beings are not naturally

adapted for submitting to the arbitrary will of others, that suggests a natural

propensity for self-rule and for resisting being dominated by others. Some

evolutionary scientists--like Christopher Boehm--explain this as an instinctive

propensity shaped in the evolution of our hunting-gatherer ancestors, among whom

there was a tense balance between the natural desire of an ambitious few for

dominance and the natural desire of the subordinate many to resist tyrannical

dominance. The establishment of agrarian states allowed for unprecedented

oppression of subordinate individuals by ruling elites. But, then, Boehm argues,

the emergence over the past few centuries of liberal capitalist societies has restored

some of the freedom from oppression enjoyed by ancient foragers while combining

it with all the benefits of modern civilization.

This suggests that rather than seeing the modern free society as the

repression of the evolved natural desires shaped in prehistoric human societies, we

should see this free society as providing the fullest satisfaction of those desires.

Even in small foraging groups, there was some individual autonomy, and

individuals were inclined to resist domination by the arbitrary wills of others. In

some respects, the modern liberal society revives the individual freedom of

foraging societies, while combining that with all the advantages of modern

civilization as based on global exchange networks. Our evolutionary ancestors

were adapted for engaging in social exchange and detecting cheaters who violated

the norms of fair exchange. Those evolved mental capacities for social

engagement provided the psychological conditions in which the cultural evolution

of a modern exchange society could succeed.

Hayek assumes that trade did not appear until the invention of agriculture

about 10,000 years ago, and then it increased with the emergence of urban

settlements about 5,000 years ago. If that's so, then there was no trade among

prehistoric hunter-gatherers, and trade would have little or no support in

genetically innate dispositions. But as I will indicate later in this paper (section 3),

there is evidence that trade arose much earlier in human evolutionary history than

Hayek thought.

80

Hayek, Constitution of Liberty, 11-20.

34

Hayek’s Denial of Reason In elevating cultural evolution and denigrating rational judgment, Hayek pushed

his antirationalist position so hard that he seemed to deny any role for reason in

criticizing or correcting spontaneous order traditions, and thus he seemed to fall

into a cultural relativism that subverted his commitment to classical liberal

principles. This complaint has been made by some of Hayek’s classical liberal

critics, such as Norman Barry.81

Although I agree with Barry on this point, I don't agree with his claim that

Hayek's mistake comes from the influence of Darwinian evolutionary theory. I

suggest that Hayek's mistake comes from his failure to see how Darwin's theory of

human evolution recognizes the decisive role of human reason in social order,

although that reason is constrained by the spontaneous orders of genetic evolution

and cultural evolution.

Barry introduces the problem in this way:

The role of 'reason' is crucially important here because the theorists of

spontaneous order are commonly associated with the anti-rationalist

tradition in social thought. However, this does not mean that the

doctrine turns upon any kind of irrationalism, or that the persistence

and continuity of social systems is a product of divine intervention or

some other extraterrestrial force which is invulnerable to rational

explanation. Rather, the position is that originally formulated by

David Hume. Hume argued that a pure and unaided human reason is

incapable of determining a priori those moral and legal norms which

are required for the servicing of a social order. In addition, Hume

maintained that tradition, experience, and general uniformities in

human nature themselves contain the guidelines for appropriate social

conduct. In other words, so far from being irrationalist, the Humean

argument is that rationality should be used to 'whittle down' the

exaggerated claims made on behalf of reason by the Enlightenment

philosophes. The danger here, however, is that the doctrine of

spontaneous evolution may collapse into a certain kind of relativism:

the elimination of the role of reason from making universal statements

about the appropriate structure of a social order may well tempt the

social theorist into accepting a given structure of rules merely because

it is the product of traditional processes.

Barry sees Hayek leaning towards relativism because Hayek fails to

distinguish "two senses of spontaneous order: noncoercive emergent patterns vs.

'survival of the fittest.'”82

By associating spontaneous order with a Darwinian 81

Barry, “Spontaneous Order.” 82

Barry, “Spontaneous Order,” 11.

35

order of evolutionary survival, Hayek falls into relativism. "For if the criterion of

social value is survival in an evolutionary process, what can be said against those

institutions which, although they may embody anti-liberal values, have

survived?"83

Barry observes: "The difficulty with Hayek's analysis is that social

evolution does not necessarily culminate in the classical liberalism that he so

clearly favors: there are as many non-liberal institutions which have survived. . . .

If we are intellectually tied to tradition, and if our 'reason' is too fragile an

instrument to recommend satisfactory alternatives, how are we to evaluate

critically that statist and anti-individualist order of society which seems to have as

much claim to be a product of evolution as any other social structure?"84

One good

example of this problem is that while Hayek favors the spontaneous order of

British common law as superior to statutory law, the spontaneous emergence of

parliamentary sovereignty in English history has subverted the common law and

the liberal order.85

Barry also rightly observes that Carl Menger, who had such a powerful

influence on Hayek's understanding of spontaneous order, did not deny the

importance of reason and constructivist rationalism the way Hayek did. Menger

did not assume that spontaneous evolved rules were always superior to deliberately

designed rules. Menger believed that reason could criticize the outcomes of

undesigned traditions and try to correct them.86

After all, as even Hayek conceded,

the successful functioning of a spontaneous order always depends on a legal and

political framework that is subject to rational criticism and deliberate design.

Barry is mistaken, however, in attributing this mistake of Hayek to

Darwinian evolutionary theory. The Darwinian evolutionary explanation of social

order--including economic, moral, legal, and political order--sees a complex

interaction of human nature, human culture, and human reason. This is evident in

Darwin's account of the evolution of the moral sense in The Descent of Man, in

which the emergence of human morality requires social instincts, habituation,

language, and deliberation.

In Darwinian Conservatism, I lay out this Darwinian explanation of the

moral sense as moving through three levels of human experience: moral

sentiments, moral traditions, and moral judgments. Moreover, by looking to the

twenty natural desires of evolved human nature, we can judge moral, legal, and

political traditions by how well they satisfy those natural desires.87

83

Barry, “Spontaneous Order,” 30. 84

Barry, “Spontaneous Order,” 46. 85

Barry, “Spontaneous Order,” 16, 46. 86

Barry, “Spontaneous Order,” 33, 52; Carl Menger, Investigations Into the Method of the Social Sciences, trans.

Francis J. Nock (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2009), 157-58, 229-34. 87

Arnhart, Darwinian Conservatism, 35-45.

36

The role of reason in this evolutionary understanding of social order is

exactly what Barry says about Hume's position as being antirationalist but not

irrationalist, which could also be said about Smith’s position. Unaided reason--

abstract or a priori reason--cannot by itself design a moral, legal, or political order.

Reason needs the lessons coming from "tradition, experience, and general

uniformities in human nature." But within the constraints set by our evolved

human nature and our evolved human traditions, we can exercise practical

judgment in deciding particular cases and devising general rules to promote the

fullest satisfaction of our desires.

Ultimately, our natural desires are rooted in our natural sense of caring for

ourselves and others as extensions of our selves, which expresses our evolved

human nature as social mammals.

2. THE EVOLUTION OF SELF-OWNERSHIP, PROPERTY, AND

MAMMALIAN SOCIALITY

If liberalism is correct in assuming that society can arise as a largely self-

regulating, unintended order from the actions of individuals seeking only the

satisfaction of their individual desires, then the naturally self-seeking desires of

individuals must somehow lead them into social cooperation with others. Smith

explains this as an expanding circle of human care rooted in care for oneself and

then extended to care for one’s property, one’s family, and to wider groups.

Darwinian science supports this individualistic explanation of social order by

showing how individuals are inclined by their evolved human nature as social

mammals to care first for themselves, and then to extend that self-care into caring

for property and for other individuals to whom they are attached.

Self-Ownership as Liberalism’s First Principle of Human Nature

In moving from moral cosmology to moral anthropology, liberalism teaches us that

while the cosmic order of the world does not care for or about us, we care for

ourselves. Consequently, the moral order of human social life conforms to the

order of human care. And having evolved to be the smart social mammals that we

are, our human societies organize themselves through an expanding circle of

human care. Human beings naturally care first and foremost for themselves as

individuals. But as social animals who cannot live or thrive without the

cooperative concern of others, human beings also care for and about others, and

they care for how they appear to others—seeking their approval and avoiding their

disapproval.

Smith sketched that naturally expanding circle of human care. Every person

is first and primarily recommended to his own care, Smith observed, because every

37

person is better situated to care for himself than for any other person, and because

every person feels his own pleasures and pains more sensibly than those of others.

One’s feelings of one’s own pleasures and pains are the “original sensations,” and

what one feels of the pleasures and pains of others is only “the reflected or

sympathetic images of those sensations.” After one’s care for oneself, one extends

one’s affections first to one’s family—parents, children, siblings, and more distant

relatives—then to one’s closer friends and neighbors, then to social relationships of

gratitude and reciprocity, then to those individuals of high rank whom one admires,

then to people whose suffering elicits one’s fellow-feeling, then to one’s country as

stirring patriotic love, and finally, there can be some universal benevolence for all

sensible beings insofar as they are brought to our attention.88

At the center of Smith’s expanding circle of care is one’s natural self-

ownership, which is the first principle of liberalism. Perhaps the earliest clear

statement of this liberal principle was by Richard Overton in 1646. Writing as one

of the English Levellers in the English civil war, Overton began a political

pamphlet by declaring: “To every individual in nature is given an individual

property by nature not to be invaded or usurped by any. For everyone, as he is

himself, so he has a self-propriety, else could he not be himself.” He saw this

claim of self-ownership as an instinctive natural desire. And insofar as every

individual can recognize that every other individual naturally asserts the same

claim to self-ownership, everyone can see that he must respect the natural liberty

of others if he expects them to respect his natural liberty.89

Later, Locke adopted this same principle of self-ownership as the ground of

natural rights.90

In his Two Treatises of Government, Locke writes: “Though the

Earth, and all inferior Creatures be common to all Men, yet every Man has a

Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The

Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his.

Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature has provided, and left it

in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and

thereby makes it his Property.”91

Locke thought it self-evident that though the

resources of nature are available in common for all, each man as master of himself

and proprietor of his own person could extend himself through labor to claim

property in those natural resources.92

Later, in the nineteenth century, British

88

Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 219-35. 89

Richard Overton, “An Arrow Against All Tyrants,” in The English Levellers, ed. Andrew Sharp (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1998), 55-57. 90

The primacy of the principle of self-ownership in Locke’s liberalism has been stressed by Michael P. Zuckert.

See Zuckert’s Launching Liberalism: On Lockean Political Philosophy (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas,

2002), 3-7, 193-97, 324-26. 91

John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, II.27. 92

Locke, Two Treatises, II.44.

38

liberals like Auberon Herbert elaborated this principle that each person as “self-

owner” was the “owner of his own mind and body and his own property.”93

Locke’s understanding of self-ownership was founded in a biological

conception of embodied self-awareness. Locke was a medical doctor and a

biomedical researcher who worked closely with some of the leading medical

scientists of his day, such as Thomas Sydenham, Robert Boyle, and Thomas

Willis.94

For example, he contributed to Boyle's experiments with his air-pump to

explore how air provided some element necessary for respiration, which apparently

sustained the natural heat of the heart that was necessary for life. Thus, Boyle and

Locke were close to the discovery of oxygen's role in sustaining animal life. One

of Locke's earliest writings was a draft manuscript on the importance of air in

respiration. He wrote: "Nature's aim seems to have been to foster that universal

heat or fire of our life. For we live as long as we burn, and are nourished by the

same fire."95

One can see here the natural teleology of functional processes in

biology. Locke also learned about how the human mind emerges from the brain

and nervous system from Willis, who is often considered the founder of modern

neurology.96

Like Aristotle, Willis dissected monkeys and apes to study their

neurological similarities to human beings, while also looking for differences that

would explain the distinctiveness of the human mind.

In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke identifies a "person"

or "self" as "a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can

consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places." All

the parts of a human body are vitally united to this thinking self, "so that we feel

when they are touched, and are affected by, and conscious of good or harm that

happens to them, are a part of ourselves; i.e. of our thinking conscious self." So

that "the limbs of his body are to every one a part of himself; he sympathizes and is

concerned for them." "Self is that conscious thinking thing . . . which is sensible or

conscious of pleasure and pain, capable of happiness or misery, and so is

concerned for itself, as far as that consciousness extends. Thus every one finds

that, whilst comprehended under that consciousness, the little finger is as much a

part of himself as what is most so."97

93

Auberon Herbert, The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State, and Other Essays, ed. Eric Mack

(Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1978), 369-75. 94

See Kenneth Dewhurst, John Locke (1632-1704), Physician and Philosopher: A Medical Biography (London:

Wellcome Historical Medical Library, 1963); and Roger Woolhouse, Locke: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2007), 30-35, 58-59, 63-64, 66-69, 75-81, 87-88, 92-97, 104-105, 109, 197-99, 246-47, 302-309,

428-29. 95

Woolhouse, Locke, 68 96

On the influence of Willis’s neuroanatomy on Locke, see Carl Zimmer, Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the

Brain—and How It Changed the World (New York: Free Press, 2004), 229-59. 97

John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II.xxvii.9, 11, 17.

39

This Lockean conception of individual personhood as embodied self-

conscious awareness of, and emotional concern for, the survival and well-being of

the body can now be confirmed as manifest in the human nervous system as a

product of mammalian evolution.

The Neurobiology of Care The biological psychology of human care might be illuminated through Antonio

Damasio’s "somatic marker hypothesis" for explaining the importance of emotion

in decision-making and consciousness. Building on an idea proposed by William

James and Carl Lange, Damasio believes that emotions arise from physiological

states of the body, so that, for example, the emotion of fear arises from the

physiological disturbance of the body associated with some fearful event.

Emotions help us to make decisions by assigning emotional valence to our choices.

Through imaginative projection, we can foresee the emotional outcome of a choice

by anticipating how we will feel--our somatic markers--if we make that choice, and

thus we might avoid a choice with fearful associations. Ultimately, this emotional

decision-making mechanism can be explained as an evolutionary adaptation to

secure the survival and well-being of the body.98

This line of thought has been extended by A. D. (Bud) Craig, a functional

neuroanatomist. He has traced out the fundamental neuroanatomical basis for all

human emotions, and he has argued that this shows how the neural substrates for

human self-awareness or consciousness are based on the neural representation of

the physiological state (the homeostasis) of one's body. This manifests the

embodiment of emotional self-consciousness. In particular, he argues that there is

a phylogenetically novel sensory pathway in primates, most fully developed in

human beings, that provides for a self-conscious integration of the physiological

condition of the body (the material "self") with one's sensory environment, with

one's motivational condition, and with one's social situation in the anterior insular

cortex (AIC).99

In imaging studies of emotion, the AIC is jointly activated with the anterior

cingulate cortex (ACC). The AIC seems to be the primary site for self-awareness

based on representations of the feelings from the body, while the ACC seems to be

the site for the initiation of behavior, which thus provides volitional agency.

98

Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons,

1994). 99

See A. D. (Bud) Craig, “How Do You Feel? Interoception: The Sense of the Physiological Condition of the

Body,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 3 (August 2002): 655-66; Craig, “A New View of Pain as a Homeostatic

Emotion,” Trends in Neurosciences 26 (June 2003): 303-307; Craig, “Interoception and Emotion: A

Neuroanatomical Perspective,” in Michael Lewis, Jeannette Haviland-Jones, and Lisa Barrett, eds., Handbook of

Emotions, 3rd

ed. (New York: Guilford, 2008), 272-88; and Craig, “How Do You Feel—Now? The Anterior Insula

and Human Awareness,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 10 (January 2009): 59-70.

40

This might explain the evolutionary neurophysiological basis for Locke's

account of natural rights. Reasoning about natural rights ultimately depends on

discerning natural human inclinations, such as self-preservation, property, social

attachment, practical judgment, and intellectual understanding, which correspond

to what I have identified as the twenty natural desires. Evolutionary neuroscience

explains how the human nervous system has evolved to serve those natural

inclinations or desires. The concrete expression of those natural inclinations will

vary according to individual temperament, individual life history, and cultural

circumstances. But there will be a universal human pattern that manifests the

evolved natural needs of human beings as the smart social mammals that they are.

The evolution of mammalian social behavior depends on the evolution of

pain or "negative affect," which includes pain, fear, panic, and anxiety. In all

vertebrates, fear and pain are represented in the brainstem and hypothalamus as

signals to elicit self-preserving behavior. In mammalian evolution, these neural

mechanisms are modified so that animals care for their offspring as well as

themselves. This includes modifying the cortex of the mammalian brain to

elaborate the representation of pain to include anxiety tied to separation from or

threat to loved ones.

Craig's research clarifies this neural evolution of pain by classifying pain as

a homeostatic emotion rather than as a sensation of touch. Pain belongs to

"interoception"--the sense of the physiological condition of the body--and it is

therefore part of the evolved mechanisms for self-preservation. The insular cortex

receives signals from all the tissues of the body, and these signals are integrated

with physical and social stimuli from outside the body and with the memory of

past experiences as well as imaginative projections of future experiences. This

supports a general awareness of the body's condition in space and time. The ACC

can then be activated to motivate behavior to correct whatever is wrong. This

neural processing mechanism seems to be unique to primates, but it's more highly

developed in human beings.

Both the insular cortex and the ACC respond not only to physical pain from

bodily injury but also social pain from social injury. It seems that in mammalian

evolution, the neural circuitry for physical pain was appropriated for registering

social pain in animals adapted for social attachment. Mammals have evolved to

care for the survival and well-being not only of themselves but also of others to

whom they are attached. Extending the neural mechanisms originally evolved for

individual self-preservation to include the welfare of offspring and social partners

secures mammalian social order. The uniquely human evolution of the neocortex

elaborates this mammalian development to sustain human love and concern for

others. When we use the language of physical pain to describe our social pain ("a

broken heart"), we recognize the embodiment of our natural social consciousness,

41

in which our mind, our brain, our body, and our social life are inseparably

intertwined.100

Social neuroscience is beginning to explain the neurochemistry of

mammalian attachment as the natural ground for human morality and social order

as rooted in human care.101

As shaped by evolutionary history, nervous systems

are organized to take care of the body. Animals with neural adaptations inclined to

care for themselves and for their well-being are selected over those that neglect

their self-preservation. In mammals, this caring for oneself is extended into care

for others--for one's offspring, for one's mate, for one's kin, and for others in one's

group. We are now beginning to explain how this works through the

neurochemistry of oxytocin and vasopressin, which support attachment and

bonding. This sustains the basic social desires or sentiments that lead to human

morality. This neurobiology of mammalian sociality confirms the argument of

Locke, Smith, and other liberal thinkers about the importance of mammalian

biology as the natural ground for the unintended social order of family life.102

Because of our evolved human nature, we care not only for ourselves and

other persons to whom we are attached, but also for the physical goods that have

some value for us, and thus we have a natural desire for property.

The Biology of Property A Darwinian view of human nature sustains the liberal commitment to private

property as a natural propensity that is diversely expressed in custom and law. The

particular rules for property rights are determined by customary traditions and

formal laws that vary across history and across societies, but that variation is

constrained by the natural desire for property. We need to understand the

complexity of property across three levels--natural property, customary property,

and formal property.103

This is illustrated in the historical case of mining law in California. Once

gold was discovered in northern California in 1848, hundreds of thousands of

people went there to search for gold, and they showed their natural instinct for

property by claiming land for mining by taking possession of it, although they

were only squatters on land officially owned by the federal government. To settle

disputes over mining claims, the miners developed customary rules that they

enforced among themselves by social tradition. Then, finally, in 1866, the United

100

See Naomi I. Eisenberger and Matthew D. Lieberman, “Why Rejection Hurts: A Common Neural Alarm System

for Physical and Social Pain,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8 (July 2004): 294-300. 101

See Patricia Churchland, Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us About Morality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press, 2011). 102

See Locke, Two Treatises, I.86-88, II.77-79; Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, 141-43, 438. 103

See Larry Arnhart, Darwinian Conservatism, 59-67.

42

States Congress passed a federal mining law that formally legalized these local

customs of the miners.

Thus, the property claims of the miners moved through three levels--natural

possession, customary rules, and formal laws. This manifests the general structure

of Darwinian social order as the joint product of natural desires, cultural practices,

and deliberate judgments.

In recent years, a growing number of law professors have become interested

in the evolutionary analysis of law, and one prime area of research has been the

evolutionary analysis of property law. This research largely confirms the

Darwinian account of property.104

This research provides a scientific confirmation for the evolutionary

explanation of property laid out originally by Locke (in his Two Treatises of

Government), William Blackstone (in his Commentaries on the Laws of England),

and Adam Smith (in his Lectures on Jurisprudence).105

First, among ancient

foraging bands, hunting territory was owned communally by the band--excluding

other bands--and personal property (such as weapons, tools, and clothing) was

owned individually. These original claims to property were based on possession

and occupancy, so that the first person to take and hold possession of something

was presumed to own it. This was enforced by customary agreement. But, then,

when agriculture was developed, the growing scarcity and thus value of land, made

it necessary to settle property disputes through the formal institutions of

government, and the invention of writing facilitated this. Finally, with the

expansion of commerce and trade, property rights became ever more subject to

rules of sale, grant, or conveyance.

We can explain the evolutionary logic for property through John Maynard

Smith's evolutionary game theory analysis of how the "bourgeois" strategy

develops among animals to settle disputes over territory and resources.106

If we

imagine two animals competing for access to a particular breeding territory, and if

they have an equal opportunity of arriving first and possessing it or arriving later

and being an intruder, we might imagine two possible strategies: the Hawk who

fights until one animal is injured and retreats, and the Dove who bluffs but never

fights. Under certain conditions, the best strategy is a "bourgeois" strategy that

mixes the other two: "if owner, play Hawk; if intruder, play Dove." In fact, many

animals do seem to play this strategy, so that the possessor of a territory tends to

104

See James E. Krier, “Evolutionary Theory and the Origin of Property Rights,” Cornell Law Review 95 (2009):

139-60; and Jeffrey Evans Stake, “The Property ‘Instinct,’” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of

London B, 359 (2004): 1763-1774. 105

See Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, ed. R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael, and P. G. Stein (Indianapolis, IN:

Liberty Fund, 1982), 13-39 106

See John Maynard Smith, Evolution and the Theory of Games (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982),

94-105.

43

have an advantage over an intruder, and consequently there is a kind of instinctive

rule of property that favors possessors over intruders.

The primacy of possession runs through much of our property law, and this

could be because it is rooted in the evolved structure of our brains so that it feels

right to us. One lawyer concludes: "Possession, as any property lawyer knows,

remains the cornerstone of most contemporary property systems--nine points of the

law, the root of title, and the origin of property."107

3. THE EVOLUTION OF EXCHANGE AND SPECIALIZATION

The liberal idea of society as a largely self-sustaining order assumes that this arises

as an unintended outcome of the actions of individuals naturally inclined to mutual

exchange and a division of labor. Smith explained this in The Wealth of Nations as

rooted in the human “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange.” Darwinian

science confirms this liberal idea by showing how a natural propensity to exchange

and specialization arose in human evolution, and how the cultural evolution of

exchange and specialization explains the prosperity of the modern world.

And yet Darwinian science also indicates that human social order cannot be

eternally self-sustaining, because human life on earth depends on capturing the

energy of the sun through photosynthesis to fuel human survival and reproduction,

and the Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us that this cannot continue

eternally. This seems to confirm a disturbing teaching of Lucretius’ evolutionary

atomism: while the atomic cosmos is eternal, the human world is not.

The Evolution of the “Propensity to Truck, Barter, and Exchange”

Smith claims in The Wealth of Nations that the "propensity to truck, barter, and

exchange one thing for another" is uniquely human and not found in any other

animals.108

Is this true, and, if true, what would it mean for our understanding of

human social life?

Haim Ofek109

and Matt Ridley110

have argued that what we now know about

human evolution confirms Smith's insight about the unique importance of

exchange for human history. The whole of human history for the past 200,000

years can be understood as the progressive extension of human cooperation

through exchange and the division of labor--from foraging bands to agrarian states

to modern commercial societies in global networks of trade. Both Ofek and Ridley

107

Krier, “Evolutionary Theory and the Origin of Property Rights,” 159. 108

Smith, Wealth of Nations, 25. 109

Haim Ofek, Second Nature: Economic Origins of Human Evolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2001). 110

Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (New York: HarperCollins, 2010).

44

see this as arising from a human propensity to exchange that cannot be seen in any

other animal.

In the first chapter of The Wealth of Nations, Smith explains the division of

labor as the primary cause for the increasing productivity of labor, which includes

the famous example of the pin factory. In the second chapter, he explains how this

division of labor arose in human history: "This division of labour, from which so

many advantages are derived, is not originally the effect of any human wisdom,

which foresees and intends that general opulence to which it gives occasion. It is

the necessary, though very slow and gradual consequence of a certain propensity in

human nature which has in view no such extensive utility; the propensity to truck,

barter, and exchange one thing for another.” Smith does not see this propensity in

other animals: “Nobody ever saw one animal by its gestures and natural cries

signify to another, this is mine, that yours; I am willing to give this for that.”

Animals beg for help, and human beings also do this as well. But in a large

civilized society, human beings require the cooperation of a great number of

strangers who feel no love, friendship, or benevolence for them. Consequently, in

such a large human society, we must secure the cooperation of strangers through

mutually beneficial trading: “Give me that which I want, and you shall have this

which you want, is the meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we

obtain from one another the far greater part of those offices which we stand in need

of. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we

expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”

Smith then indicates that the emergence of a division of labor through

exchange appears originally among savages living as hunter-gatherers, where

someone might specialize in making bows and arrows that he can trade for some

meat captured by a hunter, so that each fills a particular occupation, and thus their

joint labor becomes more productive than would be the case if each were working

only for himself.111

This is part of Smith's understanding of human social

evolution as passing through four stages of social life--from foraging to herding to

farming to commerce. Smith and other Scottish philosophers had developed a

theory of the four stages in social evolution from their study of the reports about

the native Americans in the New World, which constituted the beginning of

evolutionary anthropology.112

At the beginning of this passage, we see the fundamental idea that is

common to Smith's social thought and Darwin's biology--the possibility of design-

without-a-designer ("not originally the effect of any human wisdom") through

emergent or spontaneous order. Smith then poses an evolutionary question: Was

the propensity to exchange an original principle of human evolution, or was it a 111

Smith, Wealth of Nations, 27-28; Smith, Jurisprudence, 347-49. 112

See Ronald L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

45

late by-product of earlier evolved "faculties of reason and speech"? Although he

chooses not to take up this question here, he considers it more probable that reason

and speech came first, and then the propensity to exchange came later as a by-

product. In the Lectures on Jurisprudence, Smith says that the "real foundation" of

exchange and the division of labor is "that principle to persuade which so much

prevails in human nature."113

Like Aristotle, Smith seems to believe that human

beings are more political than other political animals because human beings have a

capacity for logos--reason or speech--that allows them to persuade one another to

cooperate for common ends, which makes exchange and the division of labor

possible. Ofek argues, however, that the evidence of human evolutionary history

now suggests that exchange was an early agent of human evolution that favored the

evolution of human reason and speech.

Smith goes on to suggest that while other animals can seem to act in concert

when they are in passionate pursuit of the same object--like greyhounds chasing

the same hare--this is the consequence not of any contract or deliberate choice but

of "the accidental concurrence of their passions" in pursuing the same object at the

same time. Non-human animals are unable to communicate with one another well

enough to say: "this is mine, that yours; I am willing to give this for that."

Notice that Smith thinks that non-human animals can engage in persuasion

by begging for attention within their families or their groups or even to elicit

benevolent care from human beings. But the range of benevolence for all animals-

-including human beings--is limited. In human civilization, individuals need "the

cooperation and assistance of great multitudes," and for this they must appeal not

to benevolence but to self-love, by persuading other individuals to engage with

them in mutually beneficial exchanges. Indeed, Smith points out that among

human beings, even beggars cannot rely totally on charitable benevolence to secure

their needs, because they beg for money that they use to buy what they need.

We might wonder whether Darwin would agree with Smith about barter or

exchange being unique to human beings in giving rise to the division of labor as a

spontaneous order. Remarkably, Darwin says little about exchange in human

evolution. But there are at least two passages in Darwin's writings that both Ofek

and Ridley cite as supporting their arguments about the human evolution of

exchange.

In the Voyage of the Beagle, Darwin describes the savage people that he saw

at Tierra del Fuego. He reports: "Some of the Fuegians plainly showed that they

had a fair notion of barter. I gave one man a large nail (a most valuable present)

without making any signs for a return; but he immediately picked out two fish, and

handed them up on the point of his spear. If any present was designed for one

113

Smith, Jurisprudence, 352.

46

canoe, and it fell near another, it was invariably given to the right owner."114

Darwin seems, then, to agree with Smith that even those living in the most

primitive foraging societies show "the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange

one thing for another."

In The Descent of Man, Darwin describes how man became "the most

dominant animal" through technological inventions such as tools:

To chip a flint into the rudest tool, or to form a barbed spear or hook

from a bone, demands the use of a perfect hand; for, as a most capable

judge, Mr. Schoolcraft, remarks, the shaping fragments of stones into

knives, lances, or arrow-heads, shews 'extraordinary ability and long

practice.' This is to a great extent proved by the fact that primeval men

practised a division of labour; each man did not manufacture his own

flint tools or rude pottery, but certain individuals appear to have

devoted themselves to such work, no doubt receiving in exchange the

produce of the chase.115

Darwin implies that the complexity of artifacts in the archaeological record

could be interpreted as evidence for a division of labor that promotes the dexterity

and inventiveness that comes from specialization. Ofek and Ridley have adopted

this line of reasoning in arguing that the explosion of technological complexity in

the Upper Paleolithic record of human evolution is a consequence of exchange and

specialization, which is confirmed by evidence that some of the material in the

human artifacts was transported over long distances, apparently by trade.

Darwin does not indicate, however, that this propensity for exchange and a

division of labor is uniquely human, as Smith does. Ridley argues that recent

research on the evolution of cooperation confirms Smith's view. Other animals

cooperate with one another based on kinship, relatedness, and reciprocity (direct

and indirect), and human cooperation show these same evolved mechanisms at

work. But cooperation based on exchange or barter is uniquely human, and it

cannot be explained as a form of reciprocity. Reciprocity means giving each other

the same thing. I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine (direct reciprocity). Or

I'll scratch your back because you have a reputation for scratching the backs of

others (indirect reciprocity). But exchange means giving each other different

things. As Smith puts it, "Give me that which I want, and you shall have this

which you want." Other animals can't do this.

To support this conclusion, Ridley cites some experiments with

chimpanzees:

The primatologist Sarah Brosnan tried to teach two different groups of

chimpanzees about barter and found it very problematic. Her chimps 114

Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 2004), 201. 115

Darwin, Descent, 69.

47

preferred grapes to apples to cucumbers to carrots (which they liked

least of all). They were prepared sometimes to give up carrots for

grapes, but they almost never bartered apples for grapes (or vice

versa), however advantageous the bargain. They could not see the

point of giving up food they liked for food they liked even more.

Chimpanzees and monkeys can be taught to exchange tokens for food,

but this is a long way from spontaneously exchanging one thing for

another: the tokens have no value to the chimpanzees, so they are

happy to give them up. True barter requires that you give up

something you value in exchange for something else you value

slightly more.116

It seems to me, though, that Ridley is obscuring some of the complexity in

these experiments.117

Brosnan and her colleagues apparently showed that chimps

do barter, at least in a situation where they can trade very low valued items

(carrots) for very high valued items (grapes). But they do not barter where the

gains from barter are small--as in trading valuable apples for slightly more

valuable grapes. One possible explanation that they suggest is that the chimps are

less inclined to take the risk from giving up a valued food item if the possible gains

are too small.

Nevertheless, it does seem that these experiments provide some support for

the Smith/Ridley position. Even if these chimps can learn to barter under some

special conditions in the laboratory, they don't seem to spontaneously barter in the

wild. This is in contrast to the human situation where bartering seems to come

easily as a spontaneous behavior, even in the most primitive human conditions, as

with Darwin's Fuegians.

The Neurobiology of Exchange

If exchange has been an important factor for human evolution for a hundred

thousand years or more, then we might expect that human neurobiological systems

would show mechanisms to support the disposition to exchange. Paul Zak has

performed some game-theory experiments that seem to show that this disposition

to exchange as based on trust is supported by the neuroactive hormone oxytocin,

which is found in all mammals, and which evolved originally to support maternal

care of offspring.118

The ancient evolution of oxytocin in human beings and other

mammals suggests deep evolutionary roots for extended human cooperation.

Zak argues that economic exchange depends upon moral values, because it

depends upon the trust that makes cooperation possible. There is evidence that this

116

Ridley, Rational Optimist, 59. 117

See Sarah Brosnan, et al., "Chimpanzee Autarky," PloS ONE, January, 2008, e1518, 1-5 118

See Paul Zak, The Moral Molecule: The Source of Love and Prosperity (New York: Dutton, 2012).

48

disposition to trust and cooperation has evolved to be part of human nature,

although the expression of that disposition varies in response to the cultural

environment. We are now beginning to explain the neural mechanisms of this

evolved moral nature. In particular, Zak has shown experimentally that oxytocin

supports moral cooperation by promoting attachment to offspring, to reproductive

partners, to friends, and even to strangers. What originally evolved to promote

mammalian maternal care for offspring has been extended to embrace ever wider

groups of individuals who benefit from exchange.

In contrast to Hayek, Zak sees economic exchange as rooted in evolved

human nature:

Values are not specific to the West or East, nor are there broadly

distinct Western and Eastern economic institutions. Rather, values

across all cultures are simply variations on a theme that is deeply

human, strongly represented physiologically, and evolutionarily old.

Similarly, the kinds of market institutions that create wealth and

enable happiness and freedom of choice are those that resonate with

the social nature of human beings who have an innate sense of shared

values of right, wrong, and fair. Modern economies cannot operate

without these.119

Zak agrees with Hayek in seeing the modern transition from personal

exchange to mostly impersonal exchange in markets as making possible the great

increases in wealth and population since the Industrial Revolution. But in contrast

to Hayek, Zak sees this cultural tradition of impersonal exchange as developing an

innate potentiality of evolved human nature.

One can see this in the research of Joseph Henrich and his colleagues who

studied the play of the Ultimatum Game in small-scale societies around the world.

Variations in the play of the game manifested variations in the cultural norms of

the societies. The higher rates of fair offers in the game were associated with those

societies that had high levels of market activity. It seemed that people who

regularly engaged in trade learned that successful trading required that traders

agree on a fair distribution of gains.120

The genetically evolved neural mechanism

of oxytocin as favoring trust will fluctuate in response to the culturally evolved

social environment. Thus, a Darwinian explanation of exchange behavior requires

a coevolutionary explanation of the interaction between genetic evolution and

cultural evolution, in which cultural evolution taps into human genetically evolved

119

Paul Zak, “Values and Value: Moral Economics,” in Paul Zak, ed., Moral Markets: The Critical Role of Values

in the Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 276. 120

See Joseph Henrich et al., “Markets, Religion, Community Size, and the Evolution of Fairness and Punishment,”

Science 327 (March 19, 2010): 1480-84.

49

psychology. Such a coevolutionary explanation is surely required to explain the

Industrial Revolution.

A Darwinian Account of England’s Industrial Revolution

Smith was certainly right that the evolution of exchange and specialization has

promoted the innovation that has fueled the growth of prosperity. But human

economic history has shown a cyclical pattern of explosive innovation and growth

followed by collapse, which some economists have called “the Malthusian trap”:

short-term increases in income due to technological improvements would bring

growth in population, which would eventually force income down as greater

numbers of people would divide up the limited resources.121

In the long run, birth

rates would have to equal death rates. This was the natural economy of all animal

species as subject to natural selection, including human beings. And this was the

pessimistic view of human population growth and decline by Thomas Malthus that

inspired Darwin’s theory of natural selection.

Then something new happened in England around 1800, so that incomes and

population rose without falling, and this has subsequently spread around the world

to the most prosperous societies over the last 200 years. The common explanation

from many economists (like Douglass North) is that the institutional incentives for

productivity—private property rights, free markets, low taxes, rule of law, limited

government—developed first in England. According to this view, the innate

human preferences for accumulating material wealth had always been part of

evolved human nature, but the cultural evolution of institutional incentives in

England was necessary to direct and channel these preferences.

Yet even though these institutional incentives are necessary conditions for

the Industrial Revolution, it’s not clear that they are sufficient to explain the

unprecedented economic growth in 19th

century England. Many, if not most, of

these institutional incentives were already present in England in the Middle Ages,

when private property was protected, taxes were low, markets were free, and so on.

So there must have been something else at work to explain the emergence of the

Industrial Revolution in the 19th

century.

Greg Clark’s answer is that from 1200 to 1800 in England, there was a

Darwinian process of “survival of the richest,” by which the richest families had

the highest fertility rates, so that their offspring could spread through the

population of England. This evolution favored the spread of middle class or

bourgeois values. "Thrift, prudence, negotiation, and hard work were becoming

values for communities that previously had been spendthrift, impulsive, violent,

121

See Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press, 2008).

50

and leisure loving.”122

“The bourgeois values of hard work, patience, honesty,

rationality, curiosity, and learning” were embedded “into the culture, and perhaps

even the genetics” of the English.123

The evidence for a cultural evolution of bourgeois values in the modern

world is strong, and a growing number of economic historians see the cultural

dominance of “bourgeois virtues” among the English as a crucial factor for

explaining the English Industrial Revolution, and Adam Smith was one of the

preeminent authors arguing for the moral dignity of bourgeois life—the life of

merchants, traders, inventers, and entrepreneurs—that had traditionally been

scorned as ignoble.124

But the evidence that this cultural evolution of bourgeois

values could have brought about a genetic evolution favoring such values is not at

all clear, since it would be hard to prove that such a genetic change by group

selection could occur in only a few centuries. It is more likely, as Smith suggested,

that the cultural evolution of a commercial society with bourgeois values began to

fuel the innate natural propensities “to truck, barter, and exchange” into a fire of

innovation and growth that would not burn out.

But these liberal bourgeois ideas needed a material fuel. According to

Ridley and some economic historians, the fuel for the ever-burning fire of British

economic growth was coal.125

The story of human civilization is the story of

capturing the flow of energy from the sun to sustain human survival and

reproduction. The Neolithic Revolution was based on a revolution in capturing the

energy of the sun: cultivating domesticated plants and herding domesticated

animals was a more efficient way of channeling the energy of the sun to do work

that would sustain the large populations of people in agrarian societies. The

subsequent history shows a movement through harnessing different sources of

energy: human muscles, animal muscles, wood, water, and wind.

The secret to why the British Industrial Revolution did not peter out was the

shift to drawing from the solar energy stored in fossil fuels. Ridley writes:

Coal gave Britain fuel equivalent to the output of fifteen million acres

of forest to burn, an area the size of Scotland. By 1870, the burning of

coal in Britain was generating as many calories as would have been

expended by 850 million laborers. It was as if each worker had

twenty servants at his beck and call. The capacity of the country's

122

Clark, Farewell to Alms, 166. 123

Clark, Farewell to Alms, 11. 124

See Joel Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy; Donald McCloskey, “Bourgeois Virtue,” American Scholar 63

(Spring 1994): 177-91; Deirdre McCloskey, The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Economics (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 2006); McCloskey, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern

World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 125

See Ridley, Rational Optimist, 213-46; and Robert C. Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global

Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 80-105.

51

steam engines alone was equivalent to six million horses or forty

million men, who would otherwise have eaten three times the entire

wheat harvest. That is how much energy had been harnessed to the

application of the division of labor.126

Environmentalists warn us that such growth as based on the extraction of

energy from fossil fuels is unsustainable, because these fuels will be depleted.

Ridley argues, however, that the process of exchange and specialization promotes

the ceaseless capacity of human beings for innovative change, and as long as

human innovation is rewarded, human beings will find unexpected solutions to

their problems. But beneath the surface of Ridley’s rational optimism, there is a

current of cosmic pessimism. The history of human civilization and of life itself

has been a progressive history as human beings and other forms of life have

become ever more efficient at extracting the energy necessary for life, and thus

“locally cheating the second law of thermodynamics.”127

But this cannot go on

forever. It all comes down to photosynthesis.

The End of the (Human) World

One of the greatest achievements of modern science over the past two centuries has

been the discovery and the understanding of photosynthesis as the process by

which the flow of energy from the Sun is harnessed to sustain life on Earth.128

Contrary to so much of the rhetoric of environmentalism that assumes a static

"balance of nature" in the biosphere that has been disturbed by human activity, the

history of the Earth is an evolutionary history of dynamic change, in which the

whole biosphere has arisen as a contingent product of photosynthesis.129

The meaning of photosynthesis is that light makes life. Sunlight provides

the energy that is captured by plants and channeled in ways that sustain the living

processes of all plants and animals. Plants use photons of sunlight to power the

process by which carbon is taken from the air and "fixed" into living tissues, a

process that requires water and chlorophyll, and which gives off oxygen.

Large multicellular creatures cannot survive without the energy levels

provided by oxygen coming from the atmosphere. But there was little oxygen in

the atmosphere until about 2.4 billion years ago, when photosynthetic

cyanobacteria began to raise the level of oxygen, and now oxygen is about twenty

percent of the atmosphere. All complex life as we know it depends on this

atmospheric oxygen. This "Great Oxidation Event" was the first great

126

Ridley, Rational Optimist, 231. 127

Ridley, Rational Optimist, 244. 128

See Oliver Morton, Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet (New York: HarperCollins, 2008). 129

See John Kircher, The Balance of Nature: Ecology’s Enduring Myth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,

2009).

52

environmental catastrophe in the history of life on the Earth. That's why some

astrobiologists believe that the best sign of life on another planet would be

evidence of oxygen in the atmosphere.

As is true for the history of all life, the history of human life depends on the

photosynthetic flow of energy from the Sun through the biosphere. The history of

human civilization shows the emergence of ever more complex levels of order

from structuring the flow of solar energy to sustain order against the entropic

tendency of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Within that cosmic pattern,

human history's three eras can be seen as three levels of ever more complex order

that require ever more complex means for extracting energy to sustain ever larger

human populations. Through most of human evolutionary history, foragers

extracted energy through hunting wild animals and gathering wild plants. Then,

about 10,000 years ago, because of the rise in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at

the end of the last ice age, farmers began to extract energy through harvesting

domesticated plants and herding domesticated animals. In the modern era,

beginning around 1750, human beings have come to rely ever more on fossil fuels

as sources of solar energy stored away in the Earth. The ultimate source of all this

energy in plants, animals, and fossil fuels is sunlight. And thus it is that life on

Earth draws cosmic support from the fires of the Sun.

If there were not enough carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, photosynthesis

would shut down. Right now, that doesn't seem to be a problem because human

activity has been raising the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide over the past two

centuries. But scientists project that over the longer term--somewhere between a

hundred million and a billion years into the future--this carbon dioxide will

disappear, photosynthesis will then stop, and all life on the planet will die.

Unless one believes that the cosmos is intelligently designed or divinely

created for the eternal good of the human species, we must face up to the future

extinction of all human life, and even all life generally. That's the ultimate

message of Darwinian science as conveyed through the scientific understanding of

photosynthesis as the evolved natural ground of all life. Many people worry about

the degrading effects of teaching evolution to our school children. Perhaps they

should also worry about teaching them about photosynthesis!

Our scientific understanding of photosynthesis confirms Lucretius’s teaching

that human life has evolved to be enduring but not eternal. The atomic cosmos is

eternal, but every world that evolves out of that atomic cosmos must eventually

pass away. This is what Strauss identified as the “most terrible truth” of Lucretian

and Darwinian science—that everything that is humanly lovable must die, because

the cosmos out of which human life has evolved is indifferent or even hostile to

our existence.

53

But even if the world that we care about is neither eternal nor purposeful,

and even if the cosmos does not care for us, our human good can still be rooted in

the immanent teleology of human nature as an enduring but not eternal product of

a natural evolutionary process.

And in securing that human good, government plays an important, even if

limited, role.

4. THE EVOLUTION OF LIMITED GOVERNMENT

Liberalism assumes that society is a largely, but not completely, self-regulating

unintended order, in that some limited governmental regulation is required to

enforce legal rules of property and exchange, to prohibit force and fraud, to secure

the military defense of society, and to provide certain public goods. Smith

defended such a limited government as necessary for the “natural system of

liberty.” Darwinian science supports this liberal idea by explaining the

evolutionary history of government, so that the limited government in a liberal

regime can be seen as a modern revival of the “egalitarian hierarchy” that once

prevailed among prehistoric foraging societies.

Liberal Governmentalism Versus Libertarian Anarchism

Since liberals stress the self-regulating character of social order, some of them

have inclined towards anarchism, with the thought that the best social order could

organize itself without any governmental regulation at all. Nevertheless, the main

line of the classical liberal tradition has recognized that some government, even if

very limited, is required for social order, which is supported by an evolutionary

history of government that has been confirmed by Darwinian political

anthropology.

The liberal inclination towards anarchism is manifest, for example, in

Ridley's version of evolutionary liberalism, which shows an almost anarchistic

scorn for government. Unlike Hume, Smith, Darwin, and Hayek, Ridley fails to

see that although governmental power is dangerous when it is unlimited and

undivided, the spontaneous order of human civilization can arise only within a

framework of general rules deliberately designed and enforced by government.

Ridley says:

Politically, I still see myself as a liberal, even a radical one, whose

distrust of putting people in charge of other people is born of

knowledge that government has been the means by which people have

committed unspeakable horrors again and again and again: under

Sargon, Rameses, Nero, Attila, Genghis, Tamerlane, Akbar, Charles

V, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Kim Jong Il, and

54

Muammar Gaddafi. Not one of them used the market to repress and

murder their people; their tool was government.

Of course, we should agree with him about the "unspeakable horrors" that come

from tyrannical government. But his mistake is the implied conclusion--that he

never quite makes explicit--that we would be better off with no government at all.

Without saying so openly, he hints at anarchism.

Smith would not agree with this. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith defended

the "simple system of natural liberty," in which "every man, as long as he does not

violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own

way, and to bring his industry and capital into competition with those of any other

man, or order of men."130

Consequently, a government securing natural liberty

would be released from any duty to supervise the industry of private people to

serve some conception of the public interest, which would falsely assume a

knowledge in the central planners that they could never have. And yet, in this

system of natural liberty, government still has three important duties: the military

defense of society against foreign threats, the administration of justice to protect

each individual of the society against unjust injuries from other individuals, and the

establishment and maintenance of certain public works and institutions that could

not be well provided by private individuals. Thus, in a society of natural liberty,

the power of government is limited but still essential.

Could there be a human society without any government at all? In The

Wealth of Nations, Smith sees the history of society as moving through four stages-

-the age of hunters, the age of shepherds, the age of agriculture, and the age of

commerce. Government first arises in the second stage, when disputes over

property make government necessary; but when human beings live by foraging--

hunting wild animals and gathering wild plants--there is no need for government,

since disputes can be settled by informal social authority.131

In at least one passage

of The Wealth of Nations, however, Smith suggests that even among hunters, there

is a need for "chiefs" to act as judges in peace and leaders in war.132

The reason for this confusion is that while foragers can live in "stateless

societies," as anthropologists would say today, because there is no formal structure

of authority that would constitute a "state," there is, nonetheless, some informal

and episodic social ranking in which some individuals act as leaders in arbitrating

disputes or fighting in war. In any case, any civilized society clearly requires

government.

Similarly, Darwin thought that the primitive foragers he saw at Tierra del

Fuego had no structure of leadership, and yet he believed that any animals who live

130

Smith, Wealth of Nations, IV.ix.51. 131

Smith, Wealth of Nations, V.i.a.1-2, V.i.b1-12. 132

Smith, Wealth of Nations, V.i.f.51.

55

in groups need leaders to resolve disputes or to organize fighting with other

groups. And certainly in the more civilized human societies, there will be a

political ranking in which ambitious individuals will compete for dominance.133

Like Smith and Darwin, Hayek saw that no large human society--or "Great

Society"--could exist without government. Only in very small primitive groups

was it conceivable to have society without government. Any civilized human

society requires governmental organizations to provide central direction for

common purposes. Even in the most free societies--those that liberals like Hayek

wanted to promote--there would always be some need for governmental coercion

to manage military defense, to enforce general rules of justice, and to provide the

economic and social security of a welfare state.134

And while general rules of law can evolve spontaneously ("grown law"),

Hayek thought, these rules will often need to be corrected by the deliberate

decisions of judges and legislators ("made law").135

Furthermore, in times of

emergency--war, rebellion, or natural catastrophe--the spontaneous order of society

might need to be temporarily suspended, and powers of compulsory organization

must be given to someone in government exercising supreme command.136

In contrast to Smith, Darwin, and Hayek, Ridley tells a story of human

civilization in which government is denigrated as unproductive exploitation.

"Merchants and craftsmen make prosperity; chiefs, priests, and thieves fritter it

away."137

"Merchants make wealth; chiefs nationalize it."138

He admits that markets cannot function well without institutions and rules

that might come from government--such as the rule against revenge killing:

"handling the matter of revenge over to the state to pursue on your behalf through

due process would be of general benefit to all." But he immediately suggests that

this does not have to be done by government. "I see these rules and institutions as

evolutionary phenomena, too, emerging bottom-up in society rather than being

imposed top-down by fortuitously Solomonic rulers."139

He cites the examples of

medieval merchant law and British common law. But he says nothing about

Hayek's point that spontaneously evolved rules often need correction by the

deliberate decisions of judges and legislators.

In one passage of The Rational Optimist, Ridley concedes that government

might be necessary for regulating markets in capital and assets and for bailing out

133

See Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle, 202-203; Darwin, Descent, 124, 127, 130, 133, 142, 157-58, 629-30, 683 134

See Hayek, Constitution of Liberty, 133-61, 253-394; Hayek, Rules and Order, 13-14, 32, 46-54. 135

Hayek, Rules and Order, 51, 88, 100. 136

See Hayek, Political Order, 109, 111, 124-26, 130-33. 137

Ridley, Rational Optimist, 161. 138

Ridley, Rational Optimist, 160. 139

Ridley, Rational Optimist, 118.

56

failing banks.140

In another passage, Ridley comes close to agreeing with Smith

about the three duties of government even in a system of natural liberty: "Not all

of the hangers-on were bad: there were rulers and public servants who lived off the

traders and producers but dispensed justice and defense, or built roads and canals

and schools and hospitals, making the lives of the specialize-and-exchange folk

easier, not harder. These behaved like symbionts, rather than parasites (government

can do good, after all)."141

These reluctant concessions to the need for government in these two brief

passages are as far as Ridley is willing to go. Nowhere does he indicate to his

reader how his leaning towards anarchism separates him from the liberal tradition

of Smith, Darwin, and Hayek.

Another recent example of a liberal inclined towards anarchism is Ralph

Raico. In Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School, Raico claims that the

fundamental idea of liberalism is that "civil society--that is, the whole of the social

order based on private property and voluntary exchange--by and large runs

itself."142

If that is a correct understanding of liberalism, as I believe it is, then

Darwinian evolutionary science supports liberalism by showing how the natural

order of society can emerge largely as an unintended order of social evolution.

Raico observes: "Since liberalism is based on the recognition of the self-regulating

capacity of civil society--of the social order minus the state--any social theory that

centers on and explicates that capacity furnishes powerful support to the liberal

viewpoint."143

Evolutionary social theory does that.

Raico explains:

Liberalism . . . is based on the conception of civil society as by and

large self-regulating when its members are free to act within the very

wide bounds of their individual rights. Among these, the right to

private property, including freedom of contract and exchange and the

free disposition of one's labor, is given a high priority. Historically,

liberalism has manifested a hostility to state action, which, it insists,

should be reduced to a minimum.144

But how should we interpret "by and large self-regulating"? Does this mean that

while society is largely a self-regulating unintended order, it does need some

minimal regulation by government in deliberately designing a legal framework that

defines the rights of property, contract, and exchange and protects individuals

against force and fraud? Historically, liberals from Locke and Smith to Mises and

140

Ridley, Rational Optimist, 9. 141

Ridley, Rational Optimist, 351. 142

Raico, Classical Liberalism, 98. 143

Raico, Classical Liberalism, 23. 144

Raico, Classical Liberalism, 1.

57

Hayek have taken this position, in which the liberal "hostility to state action" has

been expressed as a desire for a limited government that minimizes legal coercion

and maximizes individual liberty.

And yet some people (including Raico) suggest that the logical fulfilment of

liberalism is anarchism, in which government is not just limited but totally

abolished. That's the argument of those like Murray Rothbard, Roderick Long, and

David Friedman, who have defended "anarcho-capitalism” or “libertarian

anarchism.”145

A Darwinian view of the evolutionary history of society and government

would support the classical liberal endorsement of limited government, while

casting doubt on the liberal anarchist vision of abolishing government. Although

the evolutionary history of stateless societies shows that social order does not

require a Weberian state, social order does require government, even if this

governmental rule is informal, episodic, and dispersed.

The Austrian school of economics began in 1871 with the publication of

Carl Menger's Principles of Economics. Raico shows how Menger's emphasis on

unintended or spontaneous order, which was originally developed by the

philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, became a predominant element of the

Austrian tradition leading to the liberalism of Mises and Hayek. If the social

orders arising as the unintended outcome of the self-seeking actions of individuals

can lead to beneficial institutions, even though they are not the products of any

intelligent design, this supports liberalism's teaching that the best human orders are

those that arise largely as self-regulating social orders free from intentionally

designed governmental planning.

In his Investigations into the Method of the Social Sciences, Menger has a

chapter on "The Theoretical Understanding of Those Social Phenomena Which

Are Not a Product of Agreement or of Positive Legislation, But Are Unintended

Results of Historical Development."146

His question is "How can it be that

institutions which serve the common welfare and are extremely significant for its

development come into being without a common will [Gemeinwellen] directed

toward establishing them?" He goes on to explain how "law, language, the state,

money, markets, all these social structures in their various empirical forms and in

their constant change are to no small extent the unintended result of social

development."147

As he indicates here by the phrase "to no small extent," Menger

insisted that intentional design could and should be exercised to some degree in

adjusting unintended orders to changing circumstances. For example, while he

145

See Gerard Casey, Libertarian Anarchy: Against the State (London: Continuum Books, 2012). 146

Carl Menger, Investigations into the Method of the Social Sciences with Special Reference to Economics, trans.

Francis J. Nock (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2009), 139-59. 147

Menger, Investigations, 146-47.

58

argued that legislators and judges should recognize the "unintended wisdom" often

inherent in customary legal traditions, he also recognized that customary law often

needed to be corrected by statutory stipulation to make the law more suitable for

the common welfare.148

Notice also that Menger thought the history of the state could be explained

as a combination of unintended development and intentional design. Raico

objects: "It should be noted that by including the state in the same category as such

social formations as language and markets, Menger is obscuring the crucial liberal

distinction between state and civil society, coercion and voluntarism."149

In explaining the origin of the state, Menger thought that the natural instincts

for sexual mating, conjugal bonding, and parental care would have created a

familial social order in which heads of families--typically, the older males--could

develop customary rules for settling disputes between individuals, and this

customary order could become "a state community and organization even if it was

undeveloped at first."150

Weaker individuals would seek the protection of stronger

individuals. Customary rules would arise based on the general understanding of

"the necessity of certain limits to despotism." This might arise first in the minds of

those few wisest individuals who could see the need for this. Even the strong

individuals might see the need for limiting violence, because they would have a

personal interest in "the conservation of what their power has achieved."151

In

some cases, law originated through powerful conquerors who could impose their

laws on the conquered. Thus, "law arose originally from the conviction of the

members of the nation or by force."152

Raico recognizes that Menger and the other founders of the Austrian school

of economics were not as clearly liberal in their political thought as Mises and

Hayek. And even Mises and Hayek disagreed in their interpretation of liberalism,

because Mises was more strongly laissez-faire than was Hayek, who insisted that

he rejected laissez-faire and defended governmental welfare-state programs,

including a guaranteed minimum income for everyone.153

Rothbard followed the

lead of Mises, but Rothbard went even farther than Mises in arguing for a radical

form of liberalism that would abolish the state and thus allow for a self-regulating,

stateless society.

Raico suggests that there are two ways of attacking liberalism.154

One way

is to argue that liberalism overestimates the self-regulatory capacity of society,

148

Menger, Investigations, 223-24. 149

Raico, Classical Liberalism, 24. 150

Menger, Investigations, 156-57. 151

Menger, Investigations, 225. 152

Menger, Investigations, 230. 153

See Burgin, Great Persuasion, 87-97. 154

Raico, Classical Liberalism, 96.

59

because the economy works well only when it is centrally planned by government,

or because the culture cultivates good moral character only when it is centrally

supervised by an established religious authority.

The second way of attacking liberalism, which Raico regards as more

plausible, is to argue that the liberal program for establishing a limited state must

fail, because any state has a natural tendency to expand its powers without limit.

Raico thinks Hans-Hermann Hoppe is persuasive in this criticism, concluding:

"Contrary to the original liberal intent of safeguarding liberty and property, every

minimal government has the inherent tendency to become a maximal

government."155

This leads Raico to embrace the anti-statist liberalism of Gustave de

Molinari (1819-1912), a Belgian-born French economist who was identified by

Rothbard as the first proponent of "anarcho-capitalism" or "free market

anarchism." There are some problems with this appeal to Molinari, however.

Molinari did not even identify himself as an anarchist, because he rightly saw that

government was necessary for a free society.156

Molinari thought that society has always required government. Human

beings are by nature political animals, because they naturally live in social systems

that require (at least occasionally) governmental coordination by rulers. In

primitive human communities, such as hunter-gatherer bands, this governmental

coordination of society by rulers is informal and episodic. In civilized human

communities, such as bureaucratic states, this governmental coordination by rulers

is formal and enduring, and in a Weberian state, the state claims a monopoly on the

legitimate exercise of coercive violence. The choice is not between government or

no government. The choice is between a statist government or a stateless

government.

While arguing for a free market of governments, Molinari denied that this

was anarchism, which would require the abolition of government. Unlike the

anarchists, he did not expect a utopian transformation in human nature that would

allow human beings to cooperate without any need for government to deter and

punish criminal aggression. But he did think it was possible for the governmental

enforcement of order to emerge in a largely self-regulating society without a

centralized state claiming a monopoly on the legitimate exercise of coercive

violence. Like Auberon Herbert, the English liberal who adopted a very similar

position, Molinari was not an anarchist but a governmentalist. David Hart misses

155

Raico, Classical Liberalism, 96. 156

See David M. Hart, “Gustave de Molinari and the Antistatist Liberal Tradition, Part I,” Journal of Libertarian

Studies, 5 (Summer 1981): 263-90; Hart, “Gustave de Molinari and the Antistatist Liberal Tradition, Part II,”

Journal of Libertarian Studies, 5 (Fall 1981): 399-434; and Hart, “Gustave de Molinari and the Antistatist Liberal

Tradition, Part III,” 6 (Winter 1982): 83-104.

60

this point when he insists: "In spite of his protestations to the contrary, Molinari

should be considered an anarchist thinker."157

The crucial issue for Molinari is whether one considers human society

natural or artificial. If human beings are not naturally social, then social order

arises as an artificial creation of legislators using government to coerce individuals

to cooperate with one another. But if "society is a purely natural fact" founded in

the "natural instinct" for social life, as Molinari believes, then society is largely

self-regulating, and government is necessary only for the limited purpose of

securing life and property by deterring and punishing those individuals who would

use force or fraud in attacking the persons or property of others.158

By a natural instinct, Molinari observed, human beings know "that their

persons, the land they occupy and cultivate, the fruits of their labor, are their

property, and that no one, except themselves, has the right to dispose of or touch

this property."159

Like Locke and Smith, Molinari argued that property originates

as self-ownership, as a natural instinct for taking possession of oneself and then

extending oneself into resources that one appropriates for satisfying one's natural

needs. As a social animal who needs the cooperation of others, one benefits from

exchanging the fruits of one's labor with others, which supports a division of labor

in which individuals specialize in different lines of production. But "man being an

imperfect creature," some individuals will not be sufficiently aware of their need to

respect the persons and goods of others, and some individuals will initiate

aggressive attacks on others. This creates a need for security from such attacks,

and thus every society will have to provide such security.

But if it is best for consumers to have the producers of goods and services

competing for their business, so that no producer has a monopoly, then, Molinari

asks, why shouldn't this be true for the governmental production of security?

From what we know about political economy, why shouldn't we conclude that "no

government should have the right to prevent another government from going into

competition with it, or to require consumers of security to come exclusively to it

for this commodity"?160

Applying the principle of free competition to government, Molinari

concludes that the most efficient and least costly way to produce security is to have

freely competing governments acting as producers of security, so that consumers

are free to buy security from any producer who satisfies the consumers. The

producers would provide law enforcement for a fee charged to their customers.

157

Hart, “Antistatist Liberal Tradition, Part II,” 416. 158

Gustave de Molinari, “The Production of Security,” trans. J. Huston McCulloch, Preface by Murray Rothbard

(Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2009), 15-21, 41-43, 51, 53-54, 61. 159

Molinari, “Production of Security,” 53. 160

Molinari, “Production of Security,” 23.

61

Roderick Long, the founder and director of the Molinari Institute, has

elaborated Molinari's proposal as a market of freely competing protection

companies in which there would be no state with a monopoly power over legal

services. Long calls this "libertarian anarchism."161

But if anarchism means the

abolition of government, then Molinari was clearly not an anarchist, because he

defended the need for "free government," as a stateless government without the

monopoly power of statist governments.

Long has pointed to the history of the medieval Icelandic Commonwealth

(930-1262) as showing how libertarian anarchism can really work. But even if

medieval Iceland was "stateless"--in the sense that it did not have a centralized

bureaucratic state apparatus--it still had political rule. It was a chiefdom, but with

multiple competing chieftains.162

So what we see here is not the absence of

government, but rather the freedom from tyranny that can come from a system of

decentralised, limited government. The natural desire for political rule was not

eliminated. But it was channeled through a system of competing elites and

countervailing power that secured freedom and minimized exploitative domination.

Like Molinari, Auberon Herbert (1838-1906) was a liberal who argued for

an enforcement of legal order in society through voluntary associations exercising

governmental power. And like Molinari, Herbert insisted that this was not

anarchy, if anarchy meant no government, because he thought it was utopian to

believe that human beings could cooperate without any need for government to

punish those who would become aggressive threats to society. Rather than being

an anarchist, Herbert identified himself as a "governmentalist."163

Herbert thought that most anarchists were confused:

Anarchy, in the form in which it is often expounded, seems to us not

to understand itself. It is not in reality anarchy or 'no government.'

When it destroys the central and regularly constituted government,

and proposes to leave every group to make its own arrangements for

the repression of ordinary crime, it merely decentralizes government

to the furthest point, splintering it up into minute fragments of all

sizes and shapes. As long as there is ordinary crime, as long as there

are aggressions by one man upon the life and property of another man,

and as long as the mass of men are resolved to defend life and

property, there cannot be anarchy or no government. By the necessity

of things, we are obliged to choose between regularly constituted

161

See Roderick Long, “Libertarian Anarchism: Responses to Ten Objections,”

http://www.mises.org/etexts/longanarchism.pdf 162

See Jesse L. Byock, Viking Age Iceland (New York: Penguin Books, 2001). 163

Auberon Herbert, The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State, and Other Essays (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty

Fund, 1978), 375.

62

government, generally accepted by all citizens for the protection of

the individual, and irregularly constituted government, irregularly

accepted, and taking its shape just according to the pattern of each

group.164

What Herbert calls here "irregularly constituted government, irregularly

accepted" is the kind of government seen in hunting-gathering societies, in which

customary laws are enforced by social tradition through the actions of prominent

individuals exercising informal authority through the mediation of disputes and the

punishment of offenders.

Like Molinari, Herbert's liberal argument for a largely self-regulating society

with a government limited to protecting individual liberty is rooted in the natural

instinct for self-ownership.165

Herbert thought that Darwinian science supported

this "system of perfect liberty."166

As we have seen, recent advances in

evolutionary theory and neuroscience confirm this thought by showing how our

bodies and minds are naturally adapted for self-ownership and for a mammalian

sociality by which we extend our care for ourselves to others.

The Lockean History of Political Evolution Liberalism has been shaped by thinking about the evolutionary origins of

government, which was stirred by the European discovery of the New World and

the first reports by Europeans about the native Americans. In particular, José de

Acosta's Natural and Moral History of the Indies is essential for understanding

Locke's liberal political thought and how evolutionary anthropology might support

Lockean liberalism.167

Acosta (1540-1600) was a Jesuit priest who worked in Peru from 1572 to

1586, spending his last year in Mexico. His Natural and Moral History of the

Indies was published in Spanish in 1590. Following the structure of Pliny's

Natural History, Acosta's book was a comprehensive survey of the physical,

biological, and anthropological history of the New World. It was one of many

travelogue descriptions of the New World that were avidly read in Europe.

This was part of a critical turning point in world history, because for the first

time in history, the entire Earth was in a global network of human exchange. Some

historians regard this as the beginning of the modern era of human history.168

The

164

Herbert, Compulsion by the State, 383. 165

Herbert, Compulsion by the State, 45-46, 125, 130, 282, 303, 307, 337, 340, 369-75, 387. 166

Herbert, Compulsion by the State, 107-109. 167

See José de Acosta, Natural and Moral History of the Indies, trans. Frances Lopez-Morillas (Durham, NC: Duke

University Press, 2002); and Claudio Burgaleta, Jose de Acosta, S.J. (1540-1600): His Life and Thought (Chicago:

Loyola Press, 1999). 168

See David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley: University of California Press,

2004).

63

traditional European histories of human life--as formulated in ancient philosophy

and Biblical religion--were challenged by the discovery of an unknown world of

human experience. Much of modern political philosophy was a response to this

development--particularly, in the speculation about the original state of nature of

humanity, which one can see in the work of Montaigne, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau,

Hume, and Smith. Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle continued this tradition of

global natural history as inquiry into the universal history of humanity on Earth.

When Locke was writing his Two Treatises of Government, he had at least

eight books in his library on the history of the New World, including an English

translation of Acosta's book.169

Acosta's book is the one that Locke directly quotes

in the Second Treatise. This comes in Chapter 8 on "The Beginning of Political

Societies," in which Locke argues that human beings are originally by nature free,

equal, and independent, so that they enter civil society only by their consent.170

He acknowledges that one objection to this argument is that there is no

historical evidence for this claim that human beings were once free and equal, and

that they established government by consent. Locke responds by arguing that

there are two kinds of historical evidence for this--the history of America and the

history of ancient society in the Bible.

Locke's appeal to history here is fundamental not only for his Two Treatises

but also for most of his other writings. Contrary to what many of Locke's scholarly

commentators assume, his reasoning depends not on the logical analysis of abstract

ideas but on what he identifies in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding as

"this historical, plain method.”171

This method of historical reasoning from

observational experience shows the influence of Locke's medical practice and

experimental research, in which he followed the lead of his friend Thomas

Sydenham, who insisted that medical science be guided by the experimental

history of health and disease in particular patients rather than theoretical reasoning

about abstract ideas. Remarkably, with only a few exceptions, most commentators

ignore this in their reading of Locke.

So, for example, many scholars debate the meaning of Locke's account of

the state of nature as if Locke were engaged in a purely abstract argument without

reference to the observable experience of history. This ignores Locke's clear

declaration that "in the beginning all the world was America,” and that "the Kings

of the Indians in America" are "still a pattern of the first ages in Asia and

Europe.”172

Thus, Locke follows a methodological assumption that has been

169

See Batz, William G., "The Historical Anthropology of John Locke," Journal of the History of Ideas, 35 (1974):

663-70. 170

Locke, John, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), II,

sec. 102. 171

Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Intro., 2. 172

Locke, Two Treatises, II, 49, 108.

64

fundamental for evolutionary anthropology--that the study of hunter-gatherers who

have survived into recent history can illuminate our understanding of what the first

prehistoric human beings must have looked like.

That's why Locke turns to Acosta's book and quotes the following as a

description of the original state of nature: "And if Josephus Acosta's word may be

taken, he tells us, that in many parts of America there was no Government at all.

There are great and apparent Conjectures, says he, that these Men, speaking of

those of Peru, for a long time had neither Kings nor Commonwealths, but lived in

Troops, as they do this day in Florida, the Cheriquanas, those of Bresil, and many

other Nations, which have no certain Kings, but as occasion is offered in Peace or

War, they choose their Captains as they please."173

Here's a new translation of this passage from Acosta by Frances Lopez-

Morillas: "There are clear indications for a long time these men had no kings or

any form of government but lived in free groups like the Indians of Florida

nowadays and the Chiriguanas and Brazilians and many other tribes, who do not

have regular kings but in accordance with the occasions that arise in war or peace

choose their chiefs as they like."

Notice the ambiguity in this passage. On the one hand, there is said to be

among these people "no kings or any form of government" or "no government at

all," as Locke says. And yet, on the other hand, it is said that occasionally in war

or peace, these people can choose chiefs or captains to lead them.

This is an ambiguity in Locke's account of the state of nature. At times, the

state of nature seems to be an utterly asocial and apolitical state in which people

live as solitary individuals with no structure of rule at all, which can be interpreted

to mean that Locke is denying that human beings are political animals by nature.

But, at other times, the state of nature does seem to have some structure of rule,

because the family is said to be the "first society," and parental power over

children is thus the first structure of authority, although this familial society falls

short of "political society."174

This ambiguity is seen in Locke's definition of the state of nature as "men

living together according to reason, without a common Superior on Earth, with

Authority to judge between them."175

Living without any common superior or

judge with authority might suggest an asocial state of solitary individuals, but

"men living together according to reason" clearly indicates some kind of rule-

governed social order.

A similar ambiguity is that while Locke says that the state of nature is a state

of peace rather than a state of war, and thus disagrees with Hobbes, Locke also

173

Locke, Two Treatises, II, 102, quoting Acosta, book 1, chap. 25, pp. 73-74. 174

Locke, Two Treatises, II, 77. 175

Locke, Two Treatises, II, 19.

65

says that the state of nature easily becomes a state of war that induces people to

establish government to enforce peace, which agrees with Hobbes.176

Here is

where the Straussians see Locke's Hobbesianism as his secret teaching.177

But this assumption that this shows some complicated rhetorical strategy of

secret writing becomes less plausible if one looks at the anthropological reports

about America that Locke was studying. For example, one report from the French

missionary Gabriel Sagard-Theodat describes the Great Lakes Indians in Canada as

organized by familial and tribal attachments under the leadership of their chiefs,

which shows, he concluded, that "man is a social animal who cannot live without

company." And yet the reports of violence and warfare among the American

Indians show that living without formal government made it hard for them to live

always in peace with one another.

What look like contradictions in Locke's arguments actually show Locke's

effort to accurately generalize conclusions about the complex variability of this

historical experience, in which primitive people can live orderly social lives

governed by informal customary rules, even though the absence of formal

governmental institutions makes it hard to settle all disputes peacefully.

Acosta distinguishes three levels or stages in the history of government in

Peru and Mexico. The first human beings to arrive in America were savage

hunters who crossed over a land bridge from Asia to America. (Acosta was the first

person to propose this theory of the original human migration from Asia to

America over a land bridge, a theory that is now widely accepted by evolutionary

anthropologists.) These hunters had no government. "They had no chief, nor did

they recognize one, nor did they worship any gods or have rites or any religion

whatsoever."178

The second stage is "that of free associations or communities, where the

people are governed by the advice of many, and are like councils. In time of war,

these elect a captain who is obeyed by a whole tribe or province. In time of peace,

each town or group of folk rules itself, and each has some prominent men whom

the mass of the people respect; and at most some of these join together on matters

that seem important to them to see what they ought to do."179

The third stage is that of monarchy or empire--like that of the Incas or the

rule of Montezuma in Mexico. Originally, this was a "moderate rule" that is the

best, in which the kings and nobles acknowledged that their subjects were "equal

by nature and inferior only in the sense that they have less obligation to care for the

176

Locke, Two Treatises, II, 19, 123. 177

See Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 206-51. 178

Acosta, Natural and Moral History, 380-81. 179

Acosta, Natural and Moral History, 359.

66

public good." But later this monarchic rule became tyrannical as the rulers treated

their subjects as beasts and treated themselves as gods.180

In some passages of his book, however, Acosta combines the first two stages

and suggests that even the most primitive hunter-gatherers had some informal

leadership by which prominent people could mediate disputes and lead them in

war, but always constrained by the informal consent or resistance of the

community. The one passage quoted by Locke is an example of this, as though

Locke figured out that even primitive foragers would have some episodic and

informal structure of rule in which some individuals would have more influence

than others, although excessive dominance would be checked by popular

resistance.

In the state of nature, Locke observes, "they judged the ablest, and most

likely, to Rule over them. Conformable hereunto we find the People of America,

who (living out of reach of the Conquering Swords, and spreading domination of

the two great Empires of Peru and Mexico) enjoy'd their own natural freedom,

though, ceteris paribus, they commonly prefer the Heir of their deceased King; yet

if they find him any way weak, or uncapable, they pass him by and set up the

stoutest and bravest Man for their Ruler."181

The American Indian Kings were

originally temporary war leaders. "And though they command absolutely in War,

yet at home and in time of Peace they exercise very little Dominion, and have but a

very moderate Sovereignty, the Resolutions of Peace and War, being ordinarily

either in the People, or in a Council. Though the War itself, which admits not of

Plurality of Governours, naturally devolves the Command into the King's sole

Authority."182

This appeal to the historical anthropology of the American Indians as

showing that government was originally limited in its powers and its ends is part of

Locke's argument for liberal toleration in his Letters on Toleration. He argues that

there is no justification for European rulers in America to compel the American

Indians to convert to Christianity, particularly since they are "strict Observers of

the Rules of Equity and the Law of Nature, and no ways offending against the

Laws of the Society."183

In his Second Letter Concerning Toleration, Locke writes: "There are

nations in the West-Indies which have no other End of their Society, but their

mutual defence against their enemies. In these, their Captain, or Prince, is

Sovereign Commander in time of War; but in time of Peace, neither he nor any

180

Acosta, Natural and Moral History, 346, 359, 402. 181

Locke, Two Treatises, II, 105. 182

Locke, Two Treatises, II, 108. 183

Locke, John, A Letter Concerning Toleration and Other Writings, ed. Mark Goldie (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty

Fund, 2010), 40.

67

body else has any Authority over any of the Society. You cannot deny but other,

even temporal ends, are attainable by these Commonwealths, if they had been

otherwise instituted and appointed to these ends."184

In his attack on Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration, Jonas Proast asserted

that "Commonwealths are instituted for the attaining of all the Benefits which

Political Government can yield; and therefore if the spiritual and eternal Interests

of Men may any way be procured or advanced by Political Government, the

procuring and advancing those Interests must in all reason be received amongst the

Ends of Civil Society, and so consequently fall within the compass of the

Magistrate's Jurisdiction."185

In his response to Proast, Locke insisted that the question was whether

government has any power to use force in matters of religion or for the salvation of

souls. The argument against this is that governments are not established to use

force for such ends. Rather, governments are established by men only to protect

themselves against injuries from other men for which there is no protection except

governmental force. Religious opinions or forms of worship do not injure those

who disagree in any way that requires governmental force against those with those

opinions or worship.

To support this conclusion, Locke points again to the American Indians:

let me ask you, Whether it be not possible that Men, to whom the

Rivers and Woods afforded the spontaneous Provisions of Life, and so

with no private Possessions of Land, had no inlarged Desires after

Riches or Power; should live together in Society, make one People of

one Language under one Chieftain, who shall have no other Power but

to command them in time of War against their common Enemies,

without any municipal Laws, Judges, or any Person with Superiority

establish'd amongst them, but ended all their private Differences, if

any arose, by the extemporary Determination of their Neighbors, or of

Arbitrators chosen by the Parties. I ask you whether in such a

Commonwealth, the Chieftain who was the only Man of Authority

amongst them, had any Power to use the Force of the Commonwealth

to any other End but the Defense of it against an Enemy, though other

Benefits were attainable by it.186

Today's evolutionary anthropologists might complain that Locke has

confused two levels of primitive social organization--bands and chiefdoms.187

But

184

Locke, Toleration, 77. 185

Locke, Toleration, 69 186

Locke, Toleration, 76. 187

See Elman R. Service, Origins of the State and Civilization: The Process of Cultural Evolution (New York:

Norton, 1975); and Ted C. Lewellen, Political Anthropology: An Introduction, 3rd

ed. (Westport, CT: Praeger,

2003).

68

still, Locke is remarkably accurate in describing how foraging societies without

formal governments--called "stateless societies" today--enforce customary norms

of conduct through private arbitration, while also organizing around war leaders in

defense against outside groups.

Notice also that the American Indian societies to which Locke is appealing

as a standard for political freedom and limited government are societies of hunter-

gatherers in a primitive state, and they survived only as long as they remained out

of reach of the Incan and Mexican empires. Thus, these hunting-gathering

societies were both culturally uncivilized and militarily weak. The problem for

Locke's liberalism is how to combine freedom, civilization, and power.

Beginning 5,000 to 10,000 years ago, with the development of agriculture

after the Last Ice Age, human beings formed sedentary communities with growing

populations, which led eventually to the first agrarian states. In these novel

circumstances, it became ever harder for subordinates to organize to resist the

despotic dominance of their leaders, who now ruled through elaborate military,

religious, administrative, and monarchic bureaucracies.

These agrarian states provided the conditions for high civilization —

economic wealth, technological innovation, cultural progress (particularly, through

the invention of writing), bureaucratic administration, and military power. But that

high civilization came with a big price — the loss of the individual freedom from

domination that human beings enjoyed in foraging societies. Among foragers, the

inequality of power, wealth, and status is minimal. Foraging societies don’t allow

some to tyrannize over others. But agrarian states allow ruling elites to live by

exploiting those they rule.

Consequently, the history of politics over the past 5,000 years has been

largely a conflict between freedom and domination — with the rulers inclined to

tyrannical domination and the ruled looking for ways to escape that domination.

There has often seemed to be no good resolution to the conflict, because human

beings seemed to be caught in a tragic dilemma of having to choose between

freedom without civilization and civilization without freedom.

Classical liberalism attempts to overcome this dilemma through liberal

republican capitalism. The combination of a liberal society, a republican polity,

and a capitalist economy promotes both freedom and civilization: people can be

socially, politically, and economically free, while enjoying all the benefits of a

progressive civilization. The natural desires for social status, political rule, and

economic wealth will always create inequalities of rank that will incline those at

the top to become tyrannical. But we can mitigate this through social, political,

and economic structures of countervailing power that create competing elites so

that power does not become unduly concentrated or unchecked. For classical

liberals, such a system is imperfect. But it’s the best we can do.

69

The Darwinian history of politics provides scientific evidence and

argumentation that supports the account of political evolution found in the writings

of Locke, Hume, and Smith. The political history of humanity turns on the shifting

balance between authority and liberty, between the natural desire of the few for

dominance and the natural desire of the many to resist dominance. This shifting

balance underlies the three-stage evolution of political history: the egalitarian

hierarchy of Paleolithic politics, the despotic hierarchy of agrarian-state politics,

and the modern emergence of commercial republican liberalism based on a new

kind of egalitarian hierarchy combined with high civilization.

Locke uses his evolutionary history to explain three features of human social

life--property, parental care, and political power--corresponding to three natural

desires: self-preservation, reproduction, and political rule.

In his history of property, Locke sees three stages of appropriation

corresponding to the foraging life, the agrarian life, and the commercial life. The

American Indians live as foragers who gather wild plants and hunt wild animals.188

Assuming that each man asserts a property in his own person, he extends his

property through the labor of gathering plants or hunting animals that he consumes.

With the invention of farming, human beings appropriate land to themselves

by cultivating it to produce food for consumption by themselves and their families.

If land is abundant and the human population low, there is no conflict over land

use.

With the invention of money and development of commercial exchange,

farmers can produce for the market, which gives them the incentive to expand their

land claims, so that soon all the land has been claimed. Now, conflicts over the

property in land requires a government to regulate the right of property by

legislation.

Like Adam Smith, Locke marvels at how commercial exchange creates a

spontaneous order in which strangers cooperate to produce something like a loaf of

bread.189

In his history of parental care, Locke regards the conjugal society of

husband and wife as the "first society," which shows that human beings are

naturally social, because they are naturally inclined to sexual mating. From this

conjugal society arises the familial tie between parents and children. Comparing

human mating with the mating systems of other animals, Locke sees that human

beings show a long period of childhood dependency on parental care, so that for

human beings, it is natural for parents to provide extensive care that provides not

just for the existence of their offspring but for their nourishment and their

188

Locke, Two Treatises, II, 26. 189

Locke, Two Treatises, II, 43.

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education. Thus does family life as the "first society" arise from the natural desires

for sexual mating, parental care, and familial bonding.190

Children are not born in a state of equal freedom, because they are

dependent on their parents. But as they mature and acquire reason, they naturally

grow into their natural freedom. It was natural, however, for children in "the first

ages of the world" to give a tacit consent to being ruled by their fathers, which

created patriarchal political authority.191

In his history of political rule, Locke argues that since all individuals are by

nature free, equal, and independent, no one can be put under the political power of

another without his consent. By their unanimous consent, individuals agree to join

a community, and then that community by majority consent can establish any form

of government.

Locke recognizes two major objections to his reasoning. First, it is said that

there are no historical cases of people who begin as free and equal and then meet to

set up a government. Second, it is said that all individuals are born under a

government to which they owe obedience, and they are not free to set up a new

one.192

To the first objection, Locke answers that there is very little historical

evidence of the state of nature and the establishment of government by consent

only because government first arose before the invention of writing. But even so,

we can find some evidence among the American Indians and other foraging people

that originally they lived without government. We can also see in the Bible and

other records stories of how government first arose.

We can see evidence that primitive societies commonly put themselves

under patriarchal rulers or others who seemed best suited to rule them. Typically,

tribal chiefs were war leaders who exercised little authority in time of peace.

Locke sees evidence for this in the books about the New World and in the Bible.193

To the second objection--that all individuals are born under the authority of

a government to which they have not consented--Locke answers by pointing to the

obvious fact of the multiplicity of governments as showing that human beings have

regularly established new governments. Moreover, the history of colonization

provides clear cases of where people have left the governments under which they

were born to enter a new government. This indicates that when natural born

citizens obey their government, they are showing their tacit consent.194

190

Locke, Two Treatises, I, 86-89; II, 77-84. 191

Locke, Two Treatises, II, 54-63, 74-76. 192

Locke, Two Treatises, II, 100. 193

Locke, Two Treatises, II, 101-12. 194

Locke, Two Treatises, II, 113-22.

71

Locke recognizes that the history of government is largely the history of

conquest, and in wars of conquest, popular consent is ignored.195

But when

government rules by force alone, without any authority from popular consent, that

government can be overthrown whenever enough people are discontented and have

sufficient courage and opportunity to rebel. In other words, people are naturally

inclined to meet force with force, when they think they are being exploited by

tyrants. People can always choose to rebel against their government. And when

they do, they have "appealed to Heaven," which is to say, they have invoked the

God of battles.196

As suggested by both Hobbes and Locke, the ultimate ground of the natural

right to equal liberty is the natural inclination of human beings to use violence in

retaliating against those who exploit them. Machiavelli makes the same point

when he observes that a prince who is hated by his people is easily assassinated.

The Bushmen in Locke’s State of Nature In the past two centuries, anthropological studies of surviving foraging groups has

allowed us to fill in the details of what foraging life was like, although we must

keep in mind that many of these surviving foraging societies were influenced by

contact with modern societies. Much of this research confirms Locke’s liberal

account of political evolution.

One of the best studied of these foraging societies is that of the Kung

Bushmen in Southern Africa.197

In the 1950s to the 1970s, they were studied as

one of the last foraging societies in the world. Beginning in the 1980s and 1990s,

they adopted agriculture and were forced by governmental programs to give up

their foraging way of life. Genetic studies suggest that the Bushmen show the

great genetic diversity that one would expect if they were remnants of the original

human populations of Africa. Although it's a mistake to look at them as if they

were living fossils of our original Pleistocene ancestors, the foraging life of the

Bushmen does at least offer hints of the sort of life lived by the earliest human

beings. Polly Wiessner, an anthropologist at the University of Utah, has been

studying the Bushmen since the 1970s.198

There are remarkable parallels between

her descriptions of the Bushmen and Locke's account of human beings in the state

of nature.

In Locke's state of nature, everyone is equally free, and everyone has "the

executive power of the law of nature."199

This "executive power" is the power of

195

Locke, Two Treatises, II, 175-96. 196

Locke, Two Treatises, II, 240-43. 197

See Alan Barnard, Anthropology and the Bushman (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2007). 198

See Polly Wiessner, “Norm Enforcement among the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen: A Case of Strong Reciprocity?”

Human Nature, 16 (Summer 2005): 115-45. 199

Locke, Two Treatises, II, 7-13,

72

everyone to defend lives and property against transgressors, and to punish

transgressors in any way that reason and conscience dictate as required for

reparation and restraint, which includes the power to kill murderers.

Everyone acts to satisfy his natural desires--such as the desires for self-

preservation, sexual mating, parental care, and property--and everyone assumes

that others will have similar desires that they want to satisfy. They can conclude,

therefore, that to satisfy their own desires, they must satisfy the similar desires of

others whose cooperation they need. Their natural desires become natural rights

when they reflect on the conditions for satisfying their desires. Their natural rights

correspond to their strongest natural desires or inclinations. Equal natural rights to

life, liberty, and property are thus rooted in the "principles of human nature."200

In this state of nature, people live in foraging groups, like the Indians in the

New World, who live by gathering wild plants and hunting wild animals. Children

are dependent on parental care, and kinship ties are primary bonds of social life.

Parents exercise authority over children, and patriarchal fathers exercise authority

over kinship groups. Occasionally, some individuals will exercise political

leadership, particularly as military leaders in time of war. But this authority is

limited and episodic. There are no formal institutions of government. There is no

common judge with authority to rule over them. But they enforce norms of good

behavior through informal, customary agreement, with everyone having the right

to punish those who violate the norms.

The informal enforcement of social norms can keep the peace. But the

tendency to unrestrained vengeance and feuding, particularly when most people are

"no strict observers of equity and justice," can turn the state of nature from a state

of peace to a state of war, which is "full of fears and continual dangers."201

As

people settle into an agricultural way of life, and thus abandon their foraging ways,

population increases, and the disputes over land and other property become

impossible to settle without some formal institutions of arbitration and punishment.

Moreover, persistent wars with outside groups tend to turn temporary war leaders

into permanent military commanders. For all of these reasons, people in foraging

societies eventually consent to the establishment of formal governmental authority.

Consider the many ways that Wiessner's study of the Bushmen coincides

with Locke's depiction of human beings in the state of nature. Among the

Bushmen, Wiessner claims, "all adult members of the society are autonomous

equals who cannot command, bully, coerce, or indebt others."202

There is a "strong

egalitarian norm that no adult can tell another what to do."203

"All people as

200

Locke, Two Treatises, I, 86-88, 97; II, 10, 67. 201

Locke, Two Treatises, II, 123; Locke, Toleration, 43. 202

Wiessner, “Norm Enforcement,” 117. 203

Wiessner, “Norm Enforcement,” 126.

73

autonomous individuals are expected to stand up for their rights," and so everyone

has the right to enforce the social norms of the group by punishing those who

violate them.204

Kinship ties are primary social bonds. Parents care for their children. But

parents can call on extended kin to help in rearing their young. Until they reach

maturity, children have no authority independent of their kin. Unmarried young

males are particularly unruly, and they are often the objects of criticism. The

common sources of disputes include food-sharing, claims on land, sexual

misbehavior (such as adultery), jealousy over possessions, stinginess, laziness,

fighting, power struggles, and "big-shot behavior."

Punishment can take many forms--from mild to severe--mocking, mild

criticism, harsh criticism, ostracism from the group, or violent acts. Although

peace was usually maintained, there was always an underlying threat of violence,

and sometimes disputes escalated into general brawls. Although everyone is free

to punish transgressors, those who are judged to be too critical or harsh suffer from

their bad reputation.

While the Bushmen enforce norms of equality, they recognize that people

are unequal in their talents and temperaments, and therefore some people will have

more property, higher status, or more power than others. They distinguish between

those who are "strong" and those who are "weak." The "strong" are those skilled

in persuasion, mediation, hunting, gathering, music, or healing. Some who are

judged to be superior in their social skills for mediation and persuasion become

camp leaders. But those who are powerful or influential invite leveling by those

suspicious of "big-shot behavior." Wiessner writes:

Weak and average people feel free to criticize the strong and are not

reluctant to do so in their presence. Despite the fact that the strong are

frequently under fire, they are able to maintain their positive

reputations. In fact, some criticism may help rather than hurt their

reputations, as it establishes the impression of equality in the face of

real inequalities in productive abilities and social influence. The

strong generally take mocking or pantomime with good humor,

swallow criticism, or make amends. Sometimes they engage in self-

leveling by getting drunk or making fools of themselves, thereby

remaining “one of the boys.”205

But, sometimes, when leaders are perceived as too aggressively assertive, they can

be deposed and thus lose their power.

The norms enforced by the Bushmen correspond to the principles of social

cooperation recognized by evolutionary theorists. People cooperate with their kin. 204

Wiessner, “Norm Enforcement,” 135. 205

Wiessner, “Norm Enforcement,” 129.

74

People cooperate based on reciprocal exchange with tit-for-tat behavior and based

on people's reputations for being cooperators or cheaters. And people cooperate

through norms of strong reciprocity, because people are willing to enforce social

norms by punishing violators even when the punishment is costly. They do this

because they want to live in stable, cooperative groups. Wiessner observes:

Norms enforced through reward and punishment conformed closely to

desires expressed by Ju/'hoansi hunters and healers who do more than

their share to support the community, namely, to eat well and live on

their land in stable groups of close kin . . . They also created

conditions for . . . the fundamental social organization in human

evolutionary history: to live in stable, cooperative breeding

communities.206

Thus, the Bushmen live by what Locke calls "the law of nature" for the state of

nature. They also show what some anthropologists have called “egalitarian

hierarchy.”

The Evolutionary Anthropology of Egalitarian Hierarchy

The evolutionary history of government is crucial for liberal political thought

because it raises a fundamental question for liberalism: Are human beings

naturally egalitarian or naturally hierarchical? On the one hand, for most of human

evolutionary history, our ancestors lived in foraging communities that were

probably very egalitarian, with no one exercising despotic dominance over others.

On the other hand, for the past 5,000 years, most political communities have had

rigid hierarchical structures, with elite rulers at the top exploiting those at the

bottom. Modern liberal democratic republics are officially based on the principle

of human equality, with governmental authority based on the consent of the

governed. Yet, obviously, these democratic states are hierarchical in that those at

the top have more power, privilege, and property than those below them. Much of

the debate in political theory turns on how to explain this combination of

hierarchical and egalitarian tendencies in human political evolution.

One plausible explanation that is compatible with the evidence and

theorizing of modern evolutionary anthropology has been developed by

Christopher Boehm. "My thesis," Boehm says, "is that egalitarianism does not

result from the mere absence of hierarchy, as is commonly assumed. Rather,

egalitarianism involves a very special type of hierarchy, a curious type that is

based on antihierarchical feelings."207

A society can have an "egalitarian

hierarchy" in which the subordinates use sanctions--such as ridicule, disobedience,

206

Wiessner, “Norm Enforcement,” 139. 207

Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior (Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 1999), 9-10.

75

ostracism, or execution--to restrain "politically ambitious individuals, those with

special learned or innate propensities to dominate." In every society, there will be

leaders in some form. But an egalitarian society will allow only "a moderate

degree of leadership."208

Against the "visionary democrats" like Marx and Engels who believed that

hierarchical leadership could be totally abolished in the future withering away of

the state into a classless society, Boehm defends the position of the "realistic

democrats" who believe that a formal or informal system of checks and balances

can allow for moderate leadership without exploitative rule of dominants over

subordinates. There is, Boehm argues, "a universal drive to dominance." But that

natural desire for dominance can be checked by the natural desire of subordinates

not to be dominated.209

Boehm supports his argument primarily through two types of evidence--

primatological studies of chimpanzees and ethnographic studies of human foragers

and tribesmen--which he uses to infer that the common ancestor of human beings

as evolved in the Paleolithic was shaped for a foraging society of "egalitarian

hierarchy."210

While chimpanzees have a dominance hierarchy with an alpha male

at the top, they show what Frans de Waal has called "egalitarian dominance" as

opposed to the "despotic dominance" of rhesus monkeys. The rhesus alpha male is

rarely challenged by his subordinates. But the chimp alpha male can be challenged

by subordinates who create alliances to resist the alpha male who becomes too

despotic. 211

(This is similar to how Hobbes and Locke describe equality in the

state of nature.)

Likewise, human foragers in small nomadic groups that live by hunting and

gathering have ways to punish ambitious people who become too assertive.

Individuals who become too proud and aggressive can be ridiculed or ostracized.

Others in the group can simply refuse to obey their orders. Or, in extreme cases,

those who become aggressively dominant can be killed. Richard Lee, in his study

of the Kung! San nomadic foragers in the Kalahari Desert, writes: “Egalitarianism

is not simply the absence of a headman and other authority figures, but a positive

insistence on the essential equality of all people and a refusal to bow to the

authority of others, a sentiment expressed in the statement: 'Of course we have

headmen . . . each of us is headman over himself.' Leaders do exist, but their

208

Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest, 154. 209

Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest, 39, 256-57. 210

For a survey of some of the ethnographic studies of primitive societies that show egalitarian hierarchy, see E.

Adamson Hoebel, The Law of Primitive Man: A Study in Comparative Legal Dynamics (Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 1954), 27-28, 67, 81-83, 99-100, 132, 144, 171, 193, 220, 294, 296, 309-313. 211

See Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes, revised edition (Baltimore, MD: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1998); de Waal, Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other

Animals (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).

76

influence is subtle and indirect. They never order or make demands of others, and

their accumulation of material goods is never more, and often much less, than the

average accumulation of the other households in the camp."212

Boehm concludes from this that human beings evolved in the Paleolithic era

for a social life of egalitarian hierarchy in which leaders would be strictly limited

by vigilant subordinates ready to punish any overly assertive upstarts. But, then,

beginning 10,000 years ago, with the development of agriculture, human beings

formed sedentary communities with growing populations, which eventually led to

the first urban agrarian states. In these novel circumstances, it became ever harder

for subordinates to organize themselves to resist the despotic dominance of their

leaders, who now ruled through elaborate military, religious, and administrative

bureaucracies.

The profound meaning of this move in human history is captured well in the

Old Testament, in First Samuel 8, where the people of Israel want to give up the

informal leadership of judges and have a king, so that they can compete with all

the other powerful agrarian states around them. Samuel warns them of the

despotic oppression that will come from this. But they refuse to listen. Later,

modern republican thinkers--John Milton, Locke, and others--cite this as Biblical

support for their rejection of monarchic absolutism and embrace of limited

republican government.

Boehm sees modern republican government as a new form of the egalitarian

hierarchy that once prevailed in the foraging groups of our Paleolithic evolutionary

history. The universal dominance drive will express itself in the ambition of

individuals who want to rule over others, but in a republican system of governance,

their ambition is channeled and checked in ways that protect their subordinates

from despotic dominance. If Boehm is right about this, then we can say that the

cultural evolution of republican politics has produced a system of rule that

conforms to the evolved natural desires of human beings as shaped in the

Paleolithic.

And yet some people would say that this is only a highly speculative "just-

so" story that cannot be supported with scientific evidence, because we have no

scientific way to study human social behavior in prehistoric time. We can study

the prehistoric evolution of human anatomy through the evidence of skeletal

fossils. But how do we study the prehistoric evolution of human politics,

considering that political behavior doesn't fossilize?

The answer to this question is that we can now make inferences about

prehistoric human societies based on a broad range of evidence and theorizing that

has been built up over recent decades. This research includes studies of global 212

Richard Lee, The !Kung San: Men, Women and Work in a Foraging Society (Cambridge: Cambridge Universtiy

Press, 1979), 457.

77

climatic changes, the cultural anthropology of nomadic foragers, the theoretical

models of evolutionary biology, fossil records of hominid braincases, skeletons,

and teeth, and archaeological studies of prehistoric human sites. A

multidisciplinary survey of this research as illuminating prehistoric political

egalitarianism has been provided in a recent article by Doron Schultziner and his

colleagues.213

Their article reviews the evidence on the development of social and political

organization in the Last Glacial. The Last Glacial is the last ice age, a climatic

period that by radiocarbon dating began about 74,000 years ago and ended about

11,500 years ago. The Holocene epoch is the climatic period that stretches from

about 11,500 years ago to the present. During the Last Glacial, climatic conditions

were colder, more arid, and more unstable than during the Holocene.

The key point here is that the unusually stable climate of the Holocene epoch

has provided the necessary conditions for human agrarian civilization over the past

11,500 years. Prior to that, the climate of the last ice age made sedentary, agrarian

life impossible for our evolutionary ancestors, who could only live in small,

nomadic foraging bands as they moved in search of sufficient food from wild

plants and wild animals. In such small nomadic bands, with little accumulation of

property, and with no conditions for the emergence of complex social hierarchy,

social life would be egalitarian. The authors of this article argue that in the harsh

climatic conditions of the Last Glacial, human beings must have lived as

egalitarian foragers, and thus our human ancestors during this prehistoric

environment of evolutionary adaptation must have evolved for an egalitarian social

and political life. The implication of this is that human beings are naturally

egalitarian, despite the cultural evolution of hierarchy over the past 11,500 years.

Although I generally agree with the reasoning in this article, I see a

fundamental ambiguity in the argument that is never cleared up by the authors.

Here's the problem. On the one hand, the authors adopt Boehm's reasoning, which

suggests that they agree with him that the evolutionary adaptation of ancient

human foragers was for "egalitarian hierarchy" with "a moderate degree of

leadership." On the other hand, the authors contrast "political egalitarianism" to

"political hierarchy" in a way that suggests that the ancient human foragers had no

hierarchy at all, which would deny Boehm's position.

I think Boehm's right. I think human beings are naturally evolved for

"egalitarian hierarchy," but they are not evolved for an absolute egalitarianism with

no hierarchy at all. I detect a faint Marxist (or Rousseauean) propensity in the

writing of Schultziner and his colleagues--a wish to find a utopian egalitarianism in

213

Doron Shultziner, Thomas Stevens, Martin Stevens, Brian A. Stewart, Rebecca J. Hannagan, and Giulia Saltini-

Semerari, “The Causes and Scope of Political Egalitarianism during the Last Glacial: A Multi-disciplinary

Perspective,” Biology and Philosophy, 25 (2010): 319-46.

78

our evolutionary past to support the possibility of such utopian egalitarianism in

our socialist future. They write: "Political egalitarianism is a social organization in

which decisions are reached through deliberation and consensus, individuals do not

command authority over, or coerce, other group members; social status, honor, and

positions (if and when they exist) are voluntarily granted or withdrawn, and not

inherited; and individuals can freely leave their group peers or residence. Political

hierarchy is a social organization with opposite characteristics."214

Notice the dualistic opposition they set up--"political egalitarianism" is the

opposite of "political hierarchy." This contradicts Boehm's claim that

egalitarianism does not result from the absence of hierarchy, because human

beings have never lived without at least some leadership. As Boehm says, "We

always live with some type of hierarchy, which suggests that our behavior is

constrained by human nature"215

Notice also the ambiguity of the parenthetical phrase about social positions

of status in an egalitarian society--"if and when they exist"--which leaves the

reader wondering whether they think positions of leadership can be totally

eliminated or not. Later in the article, they repeat this odd phrasing--"leaders (if

they exist) have little authority over group members."216

Well, do they exist or

not? We are not told, but we are left with the impression that egalitarian societies

could have no leaders at all, which, again, would contradict Boehm, Lee, and

others who argue that even the most egalitarian foragers have some form of

leadership.

Another way in which this ambiguity is conveyed in the article is that the

authors say that foragers use "levelling mechanisms" that "keep the political

system as close to flattened as possible."217

Well, how flat is it? We are never

told. But the suggestion is that it could be completely flat. If that's the claim, then

the authors would have to defend that radical assertion of complete equality

without any hierarchy at all, which they never do.

Despite this disagreement, I can agree with everything in this article if it's

interpreted as providing evidence and argumentation for Boehm's "egalitarian

hierarchy."

The reasoning of Shultziner and his colleagues moves through six steps. (1)

They survey the data for global climatic change during the Last Glacial, and they

infer that the dry, cold, and unstable climate would have forced human beings to

live in small, foraging groups that roamed in search of plants, animals, and water.

214

Shultziner, “Political Egalitarianism,” 320. 215

Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest, 237. 216

Shultziner, “Political Egalitarianism,” 326. 217

Shultziner, “Political Egalitarianism,” 326.

79

This would have made agriculture impossible. And this would have severely

limited group size and forced the groups into a nomadic way of life.

(2) Ethnographic studies of foraging groups shows a "foraging spectrum"218

that includes semi-sedentary foragers that show some hierarchical structure, and

some anthropologists have concluded from this that our foraging ancestors in the

Paleolithic could have been hierarchical.219

But Shultziner and his colleagues

argue that the climatic conditions of the Last Glacial would have forced Paleolithic

foragers into a nomadic life, which would have limited the accumulation of

personal property, forced food sharing, and restricted the size of the group.

Consequently, they would have looked like the nomadic foragers of the Kalahari

studied by Richard Lee. They explain: ". . . These limitations on group size make

internal group affairs easier to maintain and hence reduce or eliminate the need to

concentrate power in the hands of individuals who can resolve conflicts by

coercive authority. . . This fluidity of band composition makes the domination of

others very difficult, and arguably irrelevant."220

Notice, again, their ambiguous language: "reduce or eliminate" and "very

difficult, and arguably irrelevant." But if they agree with Boehm and Lee, then

they should say that hierarchy--at least moderate forms of leadership--cannot be

eliminated or made irrelevant.

(3) Employing the logic of evolutionary biology, the authors argue that if

having high rank in hierarchical societies conferred fitness advantages--

reproductive success and better access to food and other valuable resources--then

we can infer that natural selection would favor an innate desire for dominance. But

at the same time, we can infer that there would also be an evolutionary pressure

favoring an innate desire of subordinates not to be exploited by dominants. This

would create two countervailing tendencies--the natural desire for dominance and

the natural desire to be free from exploitative dominance.

This is in fact what we see in nomadic foraging bands. "One the one hand,

the fact that foragers need leveling mechanisms means that there is an innate

tendency of some individuals to exaggerate their rank and status. On the other

hand, there exists an innate tendency to thwart others' attempts to gain power

because it may become dangerous and harmful to oneself and one's peers."221

What this means is that dominance behavior is never completely lost, but it can be

balanced by the natural tendency of subordinates to resist dominance. This

required subordinates to find ways to form coalitions to check dominants. The

218

See R. B. Kelly, The Foraging Spectrum: Diversity in Hunter-gatherer Lifeways (Washington, DC: Smithsonian

Institution Press, 1995). 219

See B. Hayden, “Pathways to Power: Principles for Creating Socioeconomic Inequalities,” in T.D. Price and G.

M. Feinman, eds., Foundations of Social Inequality (New York: Plenum Press, 1995), 15-86. 220

Shultziner, “Political Egalitarianism,” 327. 221

Shultziner, “Political Egalitarianism,” 329.

80

evolution of language could have made coalition-formation easier. And the

invention of projectile hunting weapons could have increased the power of

subordinates to challenge dominants. But then, with the cultural evolution of

farming and agrarian states, the innate disposition to dominance created ruling

elites who could escape the leveling mechanisms used by subordinates in foraging

societies.

Notice here that Shultziner and his colleagues clearly concede that

dominance behavior is innate in all human societies, and therefore they implicitly

concede that equality with no hierarchy at all is impossible.

(4) As the fourth step in their argument, they show how the fossil records of

hominid brain-size, skeletons, and teeth supports the evolution of political

egalitarianism in the Paleolithic. The increase in brain-size and the associated

evolution of language allowed subordinates to cooperate in socially complex ways

to check dominance behavior. The evolutionary reduction in sexual dimorphism

(males being larger than females) and in the size of canine teeth is associated with

egalitarianism, because males are less able to build and protect large harems.

(5) Archaeologists can see various kinds of empirical evidence for social and

political hierarchy. If some people have been buried with signs of wealth, if some

people have had larger or more elaborate housing, if there is monumental

architecture, or if there are other signs of unequal resources, then we can infer that

some people had more wealth, power, or status than others. The authors argue that

there is very little evidence of this kind for hierarchy in the Paleolithic.

They do concede that Paleolithic cave art might be interpreted as evidence

for shamans, who would have had superior status. But while this does suggest

differences of social status, they argue, it does not require rigid hierarchy.

Ethnographic studies of foragers shows that "social esteem is granted to shamans

and other individuals who benefit the group (i.e. successful hunters) only by group

members' consent, and shamans who abuse their role are constrained or even

killed."222

(6) The authors conclude by explaining the transition from the political

egalitarianism of the Paleolithic era to the political hierarchy of the Neolithic era.

The transition to a sedentary life allowed the accumulation of wealth, which

supported economic inequality. They observe: "some individuals are better than

others at hunting, gathering, herding, cultivating land and so on, and those

differences can translate into economic inequality if the ecological setting is stable

enough."223

The transition to larger and more dense populations with a greater

division of labor favored political hierarchy as power was centralized and

222

Shultziner, “Political Egalitarianism,” 335. 223

Shultziner, “Political Egalitarianism,” 337.

81

concentrated in a bureaucracy of specialists who coordinated the collective activity

of the agrarian state.

For my argument in this paper, what is most interesting about this article by

Shultziner and his colleagues is how it provides scientific evidence and

argumentation that supports the liberal account of political evolution found in the

writings of Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and Smith. The political history of humanity

turns on the shifting balance between authority and liberty, between the natural

desire of the few for dominance and the natural desire of the many to resist

dominance. This shifting balance underlies the three-stage movement of political

history: the egalitarian hierarchy of Paleolithic politics, the despotic hierarchy of

agrarian-state politics, and the modern emergence of commercial republican

liberalism based on a new kind of egalitarian hierarchy combined with high

civilization.

5. THE EVOLUTION OF DECLINING VIOLENCE AND THE LIBERAL

PEACE

If liberalism is correct in its idea that society can arise as a largely self-regulating

unintended order from the social interaction of individuals pursuing their

individual ends, then every social order must somehow manage the problem of

violence by promoting the conditions for individuals to avoid violent conflict so

that they can enjoy the gains of peaceful cooperation. Darwinian science supports

this liberal idea by explaining the evolutionary history of declining violence as an

unintended order arising from the coevolution of human nature, human culture, and

human reason. Today, looking back over the entire evolutionary history of human

social life, from prehistoric times to the present, we can see evidence for a general

trend of declining violence leading to a modern liberal peace.

The Liberal Turn from Violence to Voluntarism

From the ancient Greek liberals to Adam Smith, liberals have affirmed that the

only virtue that can be extorted by force is the virtue of justice, understood as a

negative virtue of refraining from injuring one’s neighbors.224

This virtue is rooted

in the natural human inclinations to retaliate against attacks on our persons or

property and to sympathize with the resentment against attackers felt by their

victims. Thus, any natural inclination to aggressive violence is countered by the

natural inclinations to retaliation and resentment in defense against attacks.

The classical liberal thinkers of the 19th

century were the first political

theorists to adopt the reduction in the use of force or violence as their fundamental

224

See Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 78-91; Smith, Jurisprudence, 17-19, 104-107.

82

political principle. Although previously some political theorists had condemned

some uses of force, they also wanted to use force to promote what they regarded as

good ends for social and political life. The classical liberals saw reduction in the

use of force as the fundamental condition for increasing liberty and human

progress. If liberty arises from the absence of coercive violence, then a decline in

violence means an increase in liberty, as people enjoy the benefits of voluntary

cooperation while minimizing the costs of violent conflict.

So, for example, Auberon Herbert argued that if we recognize the “natural

fact” of self-ownership—that each person owns his mind and body and pursues his

own happiness as he understands it—then there is no justification for force, by

which one person takes ownership of another, except when force is used in defense

against force. And yet, the “belief in force” has created a battle throughout human

history—“the principle of liberty against the principle of force.” The triumph of

liberty over force, Herbert asserted, will require a voluntary state, in which force is

never used against anyone, except those who initiate or threaten force against

others—“force to restrain force.”225

Thus, the aim of liberalism is to limit force or violence in order to promote

the spontaneous ordering of society through the free exchanges of individuals. The

history of liberalism in pursuit of this aim has moved in four steps. The first step is

Hobbesian—limiting the violence initiated by individuals by establishing a formal

government to enforce laws of peace. The second step is Lockean—limiting the

violence initiated by government itself by constraining its powers. The third step

is Smithian—promoting the bourgeois virtues that limit violence by favoring the

“natural system of liberty” in social and economic life. The fourth step is

Darwinian—explaining the history of declining violence and spontaneous ordering

as part of a general evolutionary history of expanding peaceful cooperation.

Darwin saw this as showing moral progress in history: “As man advances in

civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest

reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and

sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to

him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his

sympathies extending to the men of all nations and ages.”226

Robert Wright

adopted this quotation from Darwin as the epigram for his book Nonzero, arguing

that both biological evolution and cultural evolution are directed towards ever

greater complexity and range in developing the potential for non-zero-sum

cooperation that is mutually beneficial for all participants.227

225

Herbert, Right and Wrong, 43-51, 312-14, 369-76, 389-92. 226

Darwin, Descent of Man, 147. 227

Robert Wright, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (New York: Pantheon Books, 2000).

83

This Darwinian liberal view assumes a progressive conception of history as

moving from force to liberty. “The history of force,” Herbert declared, “is the

history of the continuous crumbling of every institution that has rested upon it.”228

Is this true? Or does it show a naively optimistic hope about the course of history

leaning towards peaceful cooperation rather than violent conflict? When Herbert

died in 1906, there was a growing antiwar movement based on the argument that

global trade and interdependence had made war economically futile, because war

would disrupt the international networks of exchange that allowed nations around

the world to enjoy the gains in trade. But then the violence of the two world wars

in the first half of the twentieth century made the earlier predictions of a liberal

peace seem foolish.

The Invisible Hand of the Liberal Evolution Against Violence And yet, by the beginning of the 21

st century, some social scientists saw growing

historical evidence confirming the liberal peace. Remarkably, since the end of

World War Two, the Great Powers have not fought wars with one another, and this

“Long Peace,” as some historians have called it, is the longest period in European

history without a war between the Great Powers. Moreover, since the end of the

Cold War in 1989, there is some evidence of a general decline in the number and

intensity of warfare. At the same time, some historians have noticed evidence that

rates of domestic violence (such as homicide) have declined dramatically in parts

of Europe from the Middle Ages to the present.

In 2004, James Payne’s A History of Force was the first book to survey a

wide range of evidence suggesting that Herbert was right about the liberal peace—

that the history of force is a history of declining force, so that the trend of history is

against the use of physical violence.229

This was followed by Azar Gat’s War in

Human Civilization (2006) and Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature:

Why Violence Has Declined (2011), which elaborated the evidence and arguments

for a history of declining violence rooted in Darwinian evolution.230

All of this

new scholarship on the history of war and violence confirms the Darwinian liberal

peace argument, because it shows that the decline in violent conflict has been

largely the product of a liberal cultural evolution.

There are two obvious objections to this claim of a historical decline in

violence as manifesting a liberal peace. The first objection is that modern

civilized societies generally show a far greater number of violent deaths than do

228

Herbert, Right and Wrong, 224-25. 229

James L. Payne, A History of Force: Exploring the Worldwide Movement against Habits of Coercion, Bloodshed,

and Mayhem (Sandpoint, ID: Lytton Publishing, 2004). 230

Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Steven Pinker, The Better Angels

of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Norton, 2011).

84

primitive stateless societies. The second objection is that the 20th

century was the

bloodiest century in human history, which seems to show that violence has risen

rather than declined.

In response to these objections, Payne, Gat, and Pinker concede that in

absolute numbers, modern societies are more destructive than premodern societies.

But, of course, modern societies generally have much larger populations, because

since 1800, world population has grown from under one billion to over six billion.

If we look at the rate, rather than the number, of violent acts, we can see that the

likelihood of dying from violence in the modern Western societies is much lower

than it is in premodern societies. The percentage of deaths in warfare tend to be

lower in modern states than in stateless foraging or tribal groups.231

And while the

absolute numbers of deaths from wars and atrocities in the 20th

century seem to

justify the cliché that this century was the bloodiest in history, the death rates of

some wars and atrocities prior to the 20th century are actually higher. Moreover,

most of the deaths caused by governments in the first half of the 20th century were

caused by the illiberal governments of Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and Mao Zedong.

The decline in deaths due to genocidal governments toward the end of the 20th

century can be attributed to the decline of totalitarianism and the growing influence

of liberal political culture.232

Similarly, the decline in other kinds of violence—

such as legalized torture, slavery, capital punishment, religious persecution, and

rape—shows the influence of liberal cultural attitudes favoring the protection of

individuals from violent assaults.

The influence of liberal culture runs through Pinker’s history of declining

violence as a story of six trends, five inner demons, four better angels, and five

historical forces. The first trend in the decline of violence was the Pacification

Process, by which agricultural civilizations used governmental institutions and

formal laws to reduce the violence of raiding and feuding endemic to the state of

nature of foraging and horticultural societies. The second trend was the Civilizing

Process, by which centralized authority and commercial society in early modern

Europe reduced the violence and brutality characteristic of the Middle Ages. The

third trend was the Humanitarian Revolution, beginning in the 17th and 18th

centuries, by which the European Enlightenment reduced socially sanctioned forms

of violence such as slavery and torture. The fourth trend was the Long Peace, after

World War II, the longest period in history in which the great powers have not

fought wars with one another. The fifth trend is the New Peace, since the end of

the Cold War in 1989, in which all kinds of organized conflicts have declined.

Finally, the sixth trend, beginning with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

in 1948, is the Rights Revolution, by which human beings have shown increasing 231

Pinker, BetterAngels, 47-56. 232

Pinker, Better Angels, 190-200, 328-43.

85

disgust towards violence directed at persecuted groups, such as ethnic minorities,

women, children, and homosexuals.

To understand the causes of violence, Pinker argues, we must understand the

"five inner demons" of human nature. The first inner demon is instrumental

violence, or violence employed as a practical means to any end. The second is

dominance, or violence employed to gain power or glory in contests over prestige.

The third is revenge, or violence employed by a moralistic desire for retributive

punishment. The fourth is sadism, or violence employed because of one's pleasure

in the suffering of others. The fifth is ideology, or violence employed as a means

to achieve some utopian vision of human perfection grounded in a shared utopian

belief system.

These five inner demons are countered by four better angels.

The first better angel is empathy, or a sympathetic concern for the pains and

pleasures of others. The second is self-control, or the habituated ability to inhibit

our impulses based on our anticipation of the bad consequences of impulsive

behavior. The third is the moral sense, or the social norms governing conduct that

can sometimes reduce violence, but which can also increase violence towards those

outside of one's group. The fourth is reason, or the capacity of deliberate judgment

by which we see ourselves as others see us, by which we expand our moral

concern to ever wider circles of humanity, and by which we can plan how to use

the other better angels of our nature to improve our social life.

The success of these better angels in promoting peaceful cooperation and

reducing violent conflict depends on five historical forces. The first historical

force is the Leviathan, or the legal and governmental institutions that mediate

conflict in ways that reduce the disorder that comes from the selfish impulses that

incline us to exploitation and vengeance. The second is commerce, or the

exchange of goods and ideas over ever longer distances and ever larger groups of

people, so that we see people as valuable trading partners, and consequently we are

less inclined to attack them. The third is feminization, or the process by which the

increasing status and influence of women has promoted feminine caregiving as a

check on male violence. The fourth is cosmopolitanism, or the globalization of

human culture by which an increasing number of people expand their circle of

sympathetic concern. The fifth is the escalator of reason, or the growing

application of human rationality to recognizing how violence becomes self-

defeating and how peaceful cooperation with an ever expanding circle of trading

partners becomes beneficial for all.

If one is persuaded by Pinker’s historical analysis, as I am, then one might

see this historical pattern of declining violence as showing a “higher power at

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work,” as Payne suggests.233

But instead of invoking some divine or cosmic

design in history, one might see this historical pattern as an evolutionary

unintended order guided by the hidden hand of natural selection towards the liberal

goals of peaceful cooperation and individual liberty. Evolved human nature is

capable of both violent conflict (the inner demons) and peaceful cooperation (the

better angels), depending upon how the circumstances of life trigger either

violence or peace.

As Pinker suggests, we can model the choice between peace and violence as

a Prisoner’s Dilemma reconceived as a Pacifist’s Dilemma.234

If I am trying to

decide whether to be aggressive or peaceful towards you, I face a tragic dilemma.

If I think you’re a pacifist, I will be tempted to engage in predatory aggression,

because I foresee that you will not defend yourself. But if I think you’re an

aggressor, then I will be tempted to launch a preemptive attack against you. If you

are thinking the same about me, then you will be tempted to attack me. Thus, both

of us are likely to become aggressors, we suffer the costs of our battle, and we lose

the mutual benefits we could have gained from peaceful cooperation. The logic of

this dilemma explains why human beings have been naturally inclined towards

violence motivated by fear, interest, or honor, and why it has been so hard for them

to enjoy the benefits of peaceful cooperation.

And yet, the logic of this dilemma also explains the Darwinian evolution of

declining violence as a historical pattern favoring liberalism. Given that human

beings have evolved by natural selection to be selfish, social, linguistic, and

rational animals, this combination of self-interest, sociality, language, and reason

might inevitably over time lead human beings to want less violence.235

First, as self-loving animals, we care for our lives and our well-being. We

claim ownership of our minds, our bodies, and our property. We prefer

comfortable self-preservation over a painful death.

Second, as social animals, we care about others who are attached to us—our

family, friends, and neighbors—and we care about how we appear to them. We

project ourselves into the minds of others, and we imagine whether they would

approve of us. Although we are naturally tribal animals—favoring our group over

other groups—we are also able to extend our sympathies to some extent to ever

wider circles of humanity.

Third, as linguistic animals, we can communicate with one another, try to

persuade one another, and develop shared norms of trustworthy behavior.

Finally, as rational animals, we can think through the Pacifist’s Dilemma as

a problem to be solved. By reason, we can see that while both sides are tempted to

233

Payne, History of Force, 29. 234

See Pinker, Better Angels, 31-36, 645-48, 678-96. 235

See Pinker, Better Angels, 645-48.

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mutual predation, they would both be better off if they could achieve peaceful

cooperation. We can also reason about how to create conditions that help us to

trust one another so that we can win the gains from cooperation. And as each side

in the Pacifist’s Dilemma uses reason to persuade the other side not to be violent,

both sides discover the reasonableness of nonviolence: if I want to persuade you

not to harm me, I must see that you will want to persuade me not to harm you.

We are thus led—by the evolved nature of our self-interest, our sociality, our

language, and our reason—to the principle that violence is to be avoided except

when it’s used to deter or punish violence. We are thus led to liberalism—to the

liberal principle of nonviolence and to the largely self-regulating social order that

liberal nonviolence makes possible.

CONCLUSION Liberalism depends on the idea that social life is a largely spontaneous order that

emerges unintentionally from the interactions of individuals pursuing their

individual ends. Darwinian evolutionary science sustains this liberal idea in five

ways.

First, Darwinian science confirms the empirical moral anthropology of

liberalism by explaining the spontaneous evolution of human morality through the

coevolution of human nature, human culture, and human reason, without any need

to appeal to a transcendental moral cosmology of metaphysical moral law beyond

the human mind.

Second, Darwinian science confirms the liberal principle of self-ownership

at the center of a circle of expanding care for oneself, for one’s property, and for

other individuals, by explaining how the human nervous system has evolved to

serve this circle of care as adapted for human beings as the remarkably smart social

mammals that they are.

Third, Darwinian science supports the liberal understanding of how social

order arises from the natural human “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange,” by

explaining how exchange and specialization arose early in human evolution and

then progressively expanded into the global networks of trade and communication

that sustain the prosperity of the modern world.

Fourth, Darwinian science supports the liberal belief that the largely

unintended order of society requires some limited governmental regulation by

explaining the evolutionary history of government and of the evolved human

propensity for egalitarian hierarchy that balances individual liberty and political

authority.

Fifth, Darwinian science supports the liberal idea that the spontaneous

ordering of society requires limiting violence by explaining the evolutionary

history of declining violence and expanding peaceful cooperation..

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In all of these ways, we see how the publication of Darwin’s theory of

evolution in 1859 made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled liberal.